2009 Tour Narrative
In Brief: Once again I thought that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to improve on the birds that we had seen on the four previous South China in Winter tours—but I was wrong. I revised the itinerary to add the Minjiang Estuary and Spoon-billed Sandpiper to our route, and as a result this year’s tour surpassed all our previous offerings. Many birders view our tour as a waterbird special, and in many ways it is: the spectacle of tens of thousands of swans, geese, and ducks at Poyang Hu in particular must be one of Asia’s premier avian attractions. But this tour is about much, much more than waterbirds. While this year’s final bird list was just over 196 species, it boasted an impressive array of specialties such as Scaly-sided Merganser, Bull-headed Shrike, Brown Dipper, and that most elegant of buntings, Yellow-throated. But for many of us it’s not just the rarities, but the sheer spectacle of seeing tens of thousands of birds at a single site: the innumerable swans (9000+!), geese, ducks, spoonbills, storks, and cranes at Poyang Hu will linger long in our minds. At one Poyang Hu site, we had 69% of the world population of Oriental Storks in view at one time—an impressive and alarming statistic in anyone’s book.
In Detail: “There, there, third bird from the right!” There was more than a hint of urgency in my spluttered instructions—but it was more than justified by the rarity we’d just spotted. Scrambling for our scopes, it was only a few seconds before we were all on our first Spoon-billed Sandpiper. We’d been in the Minjiang Estuary just minutes and had looked at no more than ten shorebirds before spotting our quarry. We went on to see seven others here, perhaps the best, and certainly the most accessible, site on the entire planet for this critically threatened, rapidly declining, and fabulously bizarre shorebird. An early Christmas present for us all and, as if we needed an excuse, it was ganbei (Chinese for “cheers”) all round at dinner that evening.
As if eight of one of the world’s rarest and most sought-after birds hadn’t been enough, we went on to see a first-winter Black-faced Spoonbill and two Relict and our first 25 Saunders’s Gulls. A fabulous day’s birding, for many the best day of the tour—and only our first full day in the Middle Kingdom!
It took us a lot longer to find the runner-up in the end-of-tour poll for Bird of the Trippoll. The diminutive Pied Falconet managed second place, ahead of all six (not just the usual five) species of crane that we encountered. We needed two visits to see the falconet, but then we saw three individuals together, in the very tree where we expected them to perform.
Reed Parrotbill graces the spine of the Field Guide to the Birds of China and is arguably the most attractive parrotbill on the planet (some preferred the Gray-headed encountered in Hangzhou). This year it was one of the first birds of our two days at Yancheng, on the coast north of Shanghai. Seeing a party of four early in the day, we later went on to have spectacular, scope-filling views of a bird in the garden of the reserve’s guest house. This species tied for third in our end-of-tour poll with Saunders’s Gull, while Red-crowned, our rarest crane, was voted the top Grus, squeaking past Siberian by one and blasting by White-naped by a massive 21 points.
Our introductory walk around the gardens of Shanghai Zoo turned up such quality species as our first Pale and White’s Thrushes, Yellow-bellied Tit, and Tristram’s and Yellow-browed Buntings. The following day saw us enjoying the Spoon-billed Sandpipers, while the next found us adding Dusky and Naumann’s Thrushes, Chinese Penduline Tit, and Red-rumped Swallow to our burgeoning lists.
As we flew north, it got colder, but Hangzhou’s Botanical Gardens still produced many more birds, particularly thrushes, bulbuls, and an enjoyable encounter with a large party of Gray-headed Parrotbills. Our Christmas Eve picnic breakfast near Wuyuan was interrupted by our first encounter with our rarest duck, the primary quarry at this picturesque backwater of northern Jiangxi: a magnificent pair of Scaly-sided Mergansers. Before lunch we added Masked Laughingthrush, several very confiding Brown Crakes, three Long-billed Plovers, Black-collared Starling, and, for a lucky few, a Spotted Wren Babbler; later that afternoon, Mandarin Duck and Bull-headed Shrike also fell.
We managed to find the Pied Falconets first thing Christmas Day, and our luck held at our next site, Poyang Hu. Our first day there was simply superb, with Swan Goose and Siberian, White-naped, and Hooded Cranes just feet from our coach even before we boarded the boats. The weather was as close to good as it gets here mid-winter, and we took full advantage of it to enjoy fantastic views of four species of crane; we also added Falcated Duck and the only Lesser White-fronted Geese and Baikal Teal of the entire tour. We also managed to spot another Black-faced Spoonbill among the 5180 Eurasians present, and enjoyed some superb looks at Oriental Storks, several of which flew, bill clacking, right overhead!
It was colder in coastal Jiangsu, but the birds didn’t seem to mind. As long as the new birds kept on coming, neither did we. The hoped-for Red-crowned Cranes, only recently replaced by Golden Pheasant as China’s national bird, performed astonishingly well. We’ll probably never know just how many Great Bitterns were in Yancheng’s reed beds, but they were very conspicuous, and there were undoubtedly more here than in the entire British Isles. Chinese Gray Shrike continued to prove elusive, but our journey back south yielded one cooperative individual at a fish pond full of China’s rarest gull, Saunders’s.
The next morning, we scored a fabulous first-winter Gray-backed Thrush in a park on the edge of Shanghai, then explored a tiny fraction of Shanghai city that afternoon. We rode at 431 km/hour on the high-speed Maglev train, took a short walk along the famous Bund, and even found time to go shopping in this mega-city, gearing up to host the World Expo later in 2010.
In last year’s tour report, I wrote “How many of us knew quite what to expect in modern China—and how many of us went home with changed opinions as to where the Middle Kingdom is heading? Now more than ever, China is a land of incredible contrasts and accelerating social change, a land of considerable personal wealth juxtaposed with near-grinding poverty, a land of thriving elitism, rampant ambition, and a populace with an enviable work ethic. Right now is the time to visit China, and we’ve been privileged indeed to see some of the more impressive parts of it.” All of this still holds true today.
-Paul Holt
Updated: February 2010