The loneliness of the Chinese birdwatcher-T …
Dec 18th 2008 | ZHOUSHAN
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12795527
A personal account of an exhilarating hunt for the Chinese crested tern,
possibly the world’s rarest bird
THEY are there as night falls, and your car lights pick them up as you speed
along the coast on a new and excitingly empty motorway: clusters of ragged
people who have clambered up through the barriers from the patchwork of
ancient paddy fields which this new road paved with glorious intentions has
sundered. This is Hainan, an island nearly the size of Sri Lanka which for
centuries the Chinese considered to be a place of exile and disease but which
the Communist state and its construction mafia is rebranding as a tropical
paradise. The people are not ethnic Chinese at all, but from the Li minority—
the original settlers of Hainan.
The early Chinese conquerors called them barbarians, for they drilled their
teeth and went barefoot; a poet, despising their sharp voices, dubbed them
shrike-tongued. Today the Chinese still look down on the Li but esteem them
as hunters. “Bow and knife never leave their hands,” wrote a Song dynasty
chronicler; or mist nets, a modern chronicler might add. By the side of the
road, Li men, young and old, hold clusters of wild birds by the legs, waving
them as we roar past. We skid to a halt and I get out for a closer look.
The Li men jostle to sell me supper, all of it live: white-breasted
waterhens, little egrets, a black-crowned night heron and a spot-billed duck,
the only duck where male and female look alike. Upright, herons and their
egret cousins have the gaunt, hunched air of sharp-eyed spinsters dressed for
an Edwardian salon. Hung upside down, they turn limp, resigned to their fate
except for the occasional mild jab at their captor’s hand. I have not eaten
of the family. But I did once (in a Guangzhou restaurant that kept herons,
civet cats and a live donkey in the store room) accept a bite of cormorant,
which must be similar, and it is nothing to write home about. As I turn back
to the shiny car, one of the old vendors in a torn T-shirt and shorts is
disdainful. “Ta kan ye bu mai!” he spits. “He looks and doesn’t even buy
anything.”
China is not a good place to be a bird. I learnt this when I moved from Hong
Kong, still a British colony, to Beijing. Though my home in Hong Kong was in
the heart of the city, dense scrub tumbled down the slopes from the Peak. I
was driven out of bed every morning by a raucous dawn chorus. The violet
whistling thrush was among the first to start up, and the hwamei (“beautiful
eyebrow”), with white eyestripe and rich territorial song. The koel, a
tropical cuckoo that lurks in thick cover, has a rising bisyllabic
wolf-whistle. The grey treepie, a corvid, was a late riser, but hoodlum gangs
soon made up for it. Layered over the top of all this came the screeches of
sulphur-crested cockatoos. These aerial zoomers were a feral flock. The
oldest had short lengths of chain on their legs and were released in 1941
from the aviary at Flagstaff House as the Japanese army closed in.
In my hutong neighbourhood in Beijing, by contrast, the mornings were
strangely silent. In 1958 Mao Zedong had declared war on songbirds, sparrows
in particular: he claimed they consumed scarce grain. For three days and
nights my neighbourhood, gripped like much of northern China by hysteria, had
beaten pots and pans to keep birds on the move until they collapsed in
exhaustion on the roofs and pavements of the courtyard houses. The
consequence was a plague of locusts the next year that helped bring on a
famine. “Suan le,” Mao had said when told that the anti-sparrow campaign
was not working. “Forget it then.”
Four decades after the campaign, sparrows remained scarcer in Beijing than
they should have been (though they could reliably be found being grilled on
bamboo skewers in the night markets, along with yellow-breasted buntings,
meltingly sweet, in autumn). The most common bird-sound I used to hear was
the clack of a handsome azure-winged magpie as it rummaged through my
crab-apple tree. The occasional croak drifted down from on high as a raven
returned to the Temple of Heaven. But the most memorable, and haunting,
bird-sound was man-made. An old monk in a temple down my lane had inserted
tiny bamboo flutes into the tail-feathers of his flock of pigeons. As they
wheeled over my roof, they trailed an aeolian music behind them. The old man
is gone now. So, too, are the courtyard houses and the hutong neighbourhoods,
flattened in an orgy of destruction that was supposed to make Beijing more
presentable for the Olympics.
In theory, China has lots of birds. To date, 1,329 species have been counted,
out of a world total of 9,000-odd. China has a rich mix of habitats, from
upland steppe and desert, to mountain fir and spruce forests, lowland
tropical rainforest, and wetlands. China is the world centre for pheasants,
boasting 62 out of 200 species worldwide: the tail feathers of the Reeve’s
pheasant, 60 inches (150cm) long, are prized for headgear in Peking opera.
The country has nine of 14 species of crane, a bird held in special affection
for its fidelity; and a quarter of the world’s total of ducks, swans and
geese. Many bird species are endemic (that is, found nowhere else), and China
’s south-west is particularly rich in flora and fauna, birds included.
Hainan, despite heavy logging, boasts two species unique to the island: a
partridge, and a leaf warbler discovered only in 1992.
Spotting birds in thick forest is a tantalising business and, for a reporter
with dull senses, it tips towards the frustrating. In Hainan’s high forest
reserve of Bawangling, a nondescript bird (a common white-eye, or a bird
unknown to science?) flits into view for a split second; before I have
fumbled with the focusing knob on my binoculars, it has vanished back into
the gloom. The reserve’s species list is long, but mine is grimly short,
though I did see a magnificent male silver pheasant, 40 inches from bill to
tail, crossing the forest track. And I heard a troupe of that rarest of
mammals, the Hainan black-crested gibbon, hooting away high up along the
mountain ridges. Yet my passions lie with the open coast: the intertidal
flats, the salt marshes and the mangrove swamps that every autumn, winter and
spring host (when you can find them) intoxicating numbers of shorebirds,
waders and wildfowl driven down by instinctual urge from their breeding
grounds in Asia’s far north.
In search of shorebirds, I cross by crowded ferry from Hainan to Beihai,
mainland China’s southernmost port near the border with Vietnam. Aboard, a
large box of passerines and mynah birds, heading for death in exquisite
cages, keeps up a cheerful chorus while the rest of the passengers succumb to
a dumb seasickness.
China’s coast is long and indented. It abuts relatively shallow seas,
rendered turbid by the sediment of China’s east-flowing rivers—1 billion
tonnes of sediment a year dumped by the Yangzi and Yellow rivers alone.
Hainan and Taiwan farther north provide something of an outer boundary for
the South China Sea and East China Sea respectively—comparisons are often
made between these semi-enclosed seas and the Mediterranean. The warm
monsoonal waters are rich spawning grounds for fish and other marine species.
But even more than the Mediterranean littoral, China’s is a busy coast. That
is a problem for a great diversity of wild things trying to thrive alongside
humans.
Beihai sits in a tight-lipped bay on the Gulf of Tonkin, where the rich silt
of estuaries is swept and trapped by turbid currents—a paradise for molluscs
and those that hunt them. Winter dawn is leaden, no line between sky and sea.
A flotilla of low craft chuff from left to right, man and wife hunched at the
stern. One by one, the boats break off to settle by withies that mark the
pearl-oyster beds. On each deck is a wooden shed and all the paraphernalia of
oyster cultivation: tongs and rakes, mesh-bags of oyster spat, wire trays.
Within minutes the scattered boats lay still, and the seascape takes on an
air of quiet industry, a watery allotment land.
On shore, clams and cockles sit in heaps before a long brick row of low
fisherman’s homes, the doorposts pasted with bright paper charms. Out front,
families are ankle-deep in bivalves, shovelling them into soybean sacks and
stacking these in piles. The haul, says a woman with a grin, is on its way to
the tables of Beijing.
This sea-harvest crawls up the pavements and covers the slopes of the town.
On a hill, a former glassworks with a high redbrick chimney is now home to
foreshore families who have moved in to squat. With the screech of packing
tape run off the reel, polystyrene boxes of shellfish are sealed and piled
high on to the back of motorised rickshaws. Inside the buildings, not a soul.
The light from the high windows is dappled, as if in a church, and the padded
silence is broken only by a gentle bubbling. All around, low pools are filled
with clear water, salty to the taste. Here lie molluscs in their thousands,
half-burrowed in the sand: whelks and winkles, turbans, clams and cockles,
their patterned shells matching the mottled light. Most have put out
snout-like siphons to feed, or rather to purge what impurities they had
ingested in their adolescence on the city’s tideflats.
Along the strand, there are too few shorebirds: some solitary sandpipers,
least timid of the waders, but that is it. The ranching of the mudflats has
left little for them to eat, or created too much commotion. Farther out,
there are too few seabirds. In Beihai’s port, and in the harbours up the
coast, a vivid tableau hints at why.
Here is a throng of vessels and a harbour life that in the West you see only
in turn-of-the-last-century photogravures of San Francisco, Marseille or
Brixham. Hundreds of big wooden fishing boats—pair-trawlers, beam-trawlers,
draggers, longliners and squid boats—are rafted up in rows across nearly the
whole breadth of the harbour, leaving only a narrow cut for smaller vessels
moving chaotically about the port: man-and-wife fishing boats, driven forward
in a series of regular explosions, old men sculling open boats with a single
tethered oar twisted from side to side at the stern—the yuloh, as ancient as
China itself. Everywhere is shouting, greetings, in-jokes. Ashore, groups of
women on the ground gut fish and throw them in salt tubs. But one thing is
striking: the skate, yellow croaker and pomfret are baby-sized, some smaller
than your hand. These astoundingly productive waters are being overfished.
The history of birding in China, especially along its coast, is bound up with
the story of Western imperialism, and the missionaries that arrived on its
coat-tails. Pe`re Armand David is best known for discovering the giant panda
and introducing Pe`re David’s deer to stately parks in Europe. But he also
noted 772 bird species, collecting 470 of them. Robert Swinhoe, China’s
finest early birder, was the British consul in Amoy (modern-day Xiamen) and
the first British representative on Formosa (Taiwan). He did not think his
arrival there auspicious, for on the waterlogged crossing he recorded losing
ten shirts and six nightshirts. But over two decades from 1854, Swinhoe
collected and described 650 Chinese species. He is immortalised in the
stunning Swinhoe’s pheasant, endemic to Taiwan, as well as a rail, a snipe,
an egret and a storm-petrel that breeds off the rocky coasts of Japan. On a
naval expedition to Hainan to hunt out pirates, Swinhoe found time to head
into the interior, discovering 19 unrecorded species. The Chinese mandarin
accompanying him on his rambles thought it the strangest of occupations, but
kept him refreshed with tea, cakes, a pipe and a stool to sit on.
Until a decade ago, Hong Kong was the undisputed centre for birders: as a
pastime, bird-watching was almost unknown on the Chinese mainland, and locals
still ask visitors peering through binoculars whether the bird they are
looking at is worth a lot. Hong Kong’s bird-watching society, the first in
greater China, is now a half-century old. British diplomats continued Swinhoe
’s passion: the leader of the Sino-British talks arranging Hong Kong’s
return in 1997, later ambassador in Beijing, is a leading authority on China’
s birds (and an even greater one on its moths). Hong Kong’s current chief
executive lists birding as his chief passion.
Many birds face a precarious future
The first reserve on the China coast properly to protect migrating shorebirds
and waterfowl was set up in 1975 in Hong Kong, at Mai Po, and is now run by
the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Its mudflats, mangroves and shrimp
ponds are a crucial staging post on the East Asian-Australasian flyway, along
which several million birds barrel each spring and autumn. At peak migrations
times, the sky over Mai Po is dark with ducks and waders, harried by the
eagles and hawks that hunt them. Farthest travelled is the red knot, which
breeds on the high Arctic tundra and winters as far away as South Island, New
Zealand. Rarest are the Nordmann’s greenshank, whose 1,000 surviving pairs
breed on Sakhalin; the tiny but striking spoon-billed sandpiper from
north-east Siberia; and the much larger black-faced spoonbill, whose
population has doubled to over 2,000, thanks to better protection of its
wintering sites. Up to a quarter of all black-faced spoonbills winter in Hong
Kong, returning to breed on islets in the Korean peninsula’s demilitarised
zone. Mai Po is Hong Kong’s best kept secret.
In recent years the annual number of waders stopping at Mai Po has steadily
increased, to around 60,000. Yet this rise causes the reserve’s managers
more concern than joy. Staging posts along the flyway, used by migrating
birds for millennia, are being over-exploited for shellfish. At least, says
Wen Xianji of the WWF, work with foreshoremen in Guangdong and Fujian
provinces to minimise bird disturbances is paying off.
Worse, rich mudflats are being “reclaimed” for development. The most
notorious example, in South Korea, is a 20-mile (33km) seawall built to
enclose a huge estuary and mudflats at Saemangeum, an area two-thirds the
size of Singapore where 400,000 birds, including the spoon-billed sandpiper
and Nordmann’s greenshank, had fed. But reclamation down the Chinese coast
is happening at breakneck pace, with few controls: not even official reserves
are safe from developers. More birds are pushed down to Mai Po as a result.
They arrive exhausted and Mai Po, however well protected from fishermen and
foreshoremen, lacks the food resources to allow so many birds to build up
reserves of fat for their onward migration.
And then there is pollution. The press of several hundred million people
along the coast threatens marine organisms at risk from river discharges,
heavy metals and pesticides from farmed shrimp ponds, oil spills, antifouling
paint on boats and other chemical contaminants. Brian Morton, an expert on
China’s seashore ecology recently retired from the University of Hong Kong,
points out that only one-tenth of Chinese sewage is treated, leading to
eutrophication and algal blooms in the East China Sea and Yellow Sea. In
addition, several tens of thousands of seabirds are reckoned to be killed
every year by an entangling mass of flotsam—fishing gear, grocery bags and
the like. “As a biologist,” says Mr Morton, “I know that ecosystems can be
restored. Still, the waters of China are virtually beyond redemption.”
But the rise of an entirely new species in China brings hope to
conservationists: the mainland birdwatcher. First sightings came from the
boom city of Shenzhen, across the bay from Mai Po. Since 2004 the Shenzhen
Birdwatching Society has fought to keep developers away from the Futien
reserve that acts as a complement to Mai Po. Now, two dozen such societies
have sprung up in China, mainly along the coast whose development has brought
prosperity (you need money to be a birdwatcher: for binoculars, spotting
scope and camera equipment). This growing band is trying to halt the
destruction that development has brought, teaching youngsters about the joy
of birds and holding local governments and businesses to account when they
trash wild places. “Let’s hear it”, says Mr Morton, “for the birdwatchers.
”
A sight from the past
Eight years ago another species came suddenly back from the dead. In 1937 a
Chinese ornithologist, T.H. Shaw, in the days of innocence when the
scientific approach to the study of birds was to blast them out of the sky,
had killed 21 Chinese crested terns at their breeding colony on an island off
the Shandong coast, near where the sailing Olympics were held this year. The
specimens were stuffed into a museum drawer in Beijing. The Chinese crested
tern was not seen again and was presumed extinct.
Until 2000, that is. That summer, a group of Taiwanese twitchers were on an
islet just off the Fujian coast, part of the disputed Mazu archipelago that
has been controlled by Taiwan since the end of China’s civil war in 1949.
They were admiring a colony of greater crested terns when, to their
amazement, they counted four pairs of an unusual crested tern among them
which sported a diagnostic black tip to their orange bills: the Chinese
crested tern.
The news electrified an irrepressible young mainland ornithologist, Chen
Shuihua, from Zhejiang province’s natural history museum in Hangzhou. Mr
Chen had started his career studying the ecology of city birds, before
switching to seabirds “because to my amazement no one in China was studying
them.” Knowing for sure that the Chinese crested tern was extinct on its
northern former breeding grounds in Shandong, he figured that the main hope
of finding other breeding birds was in the Zhoushan chain, a rocky group of
200 islands strung out, equidistant between Mazu and Shandong, across the
mouth of Hangzhou bay.
Over the course of two summers, Mr Chen slept aboard a fishing boat,
travelling from island to island over the whole chain. In August of the
second year, he found a handful of Chinese crested terns nesting among a
colony of greater crested terns. For two further years, he searched the rocky
coastal islets south of the Zhoushan group and found a few more. He was able
to hazard at the time that perhaps 50 terns survived.
Soon, however, disaster. In 2005 no birds bred successfully, their chicks
carried away from barren rocks by two August typhoons. In 2005 and 2006 not a
single Chinese crested tern was to be seen. In 2007 Mr Chen found four
breeding pairs among a 1,000-strong colony of greater crested terns. Then one
summer night a fisherman came out and took away 1,000 of the colony’s eggs,
including all from the Chinese crested terns. The haul would have earned him
35,000 yuan ($5,000) from coastal restaurants where seabirds’ eggs have
become a delicacy—a good night’s work for someone who could not make that
much in a year of fishing.
Mr Chen has begged and pleaded with the authorities in Zhejiang province for
more protection—boats and wardens—for breeding colonies, and tried to
persuade local fishing communities of their special value. One humid dawn
last August, I joined Mr Chen and his Zhoushan warden aboard a decrepit craft
that served well enough as a safe patrol vessel—so long, I thought, as the
sea remained flat. The boat shook and shuddered as it steamed out to a
cluster of four islets some way out from the main island.
Around the islets, a brown riptide; above, as we approached, a swirling ball
of greater-crested terns and black-tailed gulls, with Swinhoe’s egrets
orbiting around the outside. As the skipper landed us on the first of the
rocks, the cries of the crested terns became deafening. Indignant parents
charged us at eye level before rising over our heads and turning back for
another run. One of them, I noticed as it skimmed my head, had a bright
orange bill with a black tip: an exhilarating moment.
With nets and bags of leg rings, we spread out over the rocks. Everywhere
were flightless chicks, some scurrying to hide in hollows, others heading for
the sea. I now understand better the force of the term “treading on eggshells
”, for greyish chicks and speckled eggs lay everywhere, easily overlooked on
the guano-spattered rocks. I began to wonder whether my oafishness would do
more harm to the Chinese crested tern than T.H. Shaw did.
In a stench of ammonia, we ringed the hundreds of chicks as quickly as we
could. And there, not far from each other, two chicks were sitting that were
whiter than the mottled grey offspring of the greater crested terns. They
were the first Chinese crested terns ever to be ringed, and the only
offspring of the species in 2008.
By Mr Chen’s calculation, that brings the population of what is possibly the
world’s rarest bird up to 32, surviving in colonies near some of the densest
human populations on earth. The ringing is just the first step in trying to
understand a bird about which almost nothing is known. It is not clear
whether the breeding population around the Zhoushan islands mixes with the
one on Mazu. Nor is the birds’ wintering range known—possibly the
Philippines, Borneo and perhaps Myanmar. Recent funding for a conservation
plan, through Birdlife Asia, a conservation group, is a start. But protecting
colonies from egg-hunters is the immediate challenge, and not only in
Zhejiang province. For much of the past half-century, the Taiwanese military
presence on Mazu has been a deterrent to mainland poachers. Now peace is
breaking out across the Taiwan Strait and Taiwanese soldiers are loth to
create a political incident by arresting Chinese fishermen.
Mr Chen has been lobbying the authorities vociferously. “If I were a
government official,” he says, “maybe I’d be more prudent. But it’s my
duty to speak out, and as a scientist, I’m listened to.” He’s getting
somewhere. As well as providing the rickety patrol vessel and its crew, local
authorities even take pride that something so rare falls within their
jurisdiction. Mr Chen and fellow birdwatchers spread their passions in local
schools, holding school “bird fairs” and celebrating wetlands and wildness
that most Chinese people regard as a waste of space or food.
Western environmentalists brought up on direct action and confrontation might
view the China’s attempts to save the environment as wet and weak-kneed.
Others search in vain in China’s environmental movement for a democratic
vanguard, in evidence during the last days of the Soviet Union. Mass
protests, such as successful demonstrations in 2007 by residents of Xiamen
against a planned chemical plant on the coast, are localised.
Yet in protean China, one constant is that opposing the Communist state
brings down a mailed fist. If protecting habitats and species is the aim, Mr
Chen and his kind are better at the job than outsiders give them credit for.
As Mr Chen points out, influencing government policy was unthinkable two
decades ago. So even as they scan the woodlands, rocky islets or mudflats,
China’s environmentalists, ever so slowly, are giving a boost not just to
other species but also to citizens, for they are becoming a social force.
Another reason, then, to hear it for the birdwatchers.
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