2007 Tour Narrative
In Brief: I thought that it would be very difficult, even impossible, to improve on the birds that we saw on last winter’s South China tour, but I was wrong: our 2007 tour surpassed even that memorable trip in so many respects. So what will our longest lasting memories of this year’s tour be? Will it be an individual species such as Scaly-sided Merganser, one of the five species of crane, perhaps Siberian or Red-crowned, or something totally different, perhaps Pied Falconet or a passerine such as Reed Parrotbill or Yellow-throated Bunting? Or could our fondest memory be the sheer spectacle of tens of thousands of birds— the thousands of swans, geese, and ducks, or the spoonbills, storks, and cranes on Shahu, Poyang Hu’s single most bird-thronged lake? High on the list of my own avian memories are our first Tristram’s Buntings in the Botanical Gardens at Hangzhou, our first Bull-headed Shrike on the edge of the attractive traditional village at Xiaoqi, the Yellow-browed Buntings we saw the following day near “Moon Bay,” and the Gray-chinned Minivets near Wuyuan the day after. And that list would bring me up to only the fourth day of the tour—the full catalogue would be a long one indeed! Numerous people view our South China in Winter tour as a water bird 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 the tour’s much, much more than just a water bird special.
In Detail: The tour started well with an introductory walk across the waste ground close to Pudong International Airport in Shanghai. Here, only yards away from busy roads, one of Asia’s busiest international airports, and the world’s fastest passenger train, we watched our first Chinese birds, among them several parties of hyperactive Vinous-throated Parrotbills, umpteen Olive-backed Pipits, and our first four species of bunting. That same afternoon we visited the attractive Hangzhou Botanical Gardens in neighboring Zhejiang Province, followed the next day by a jaunt to Xiaoqi on the edge of the town of Wuyuan. Qingyu hadn’t even set up our lunch when our principal quarry at the latter site flew in: a fine Pied Falconet landed in the very tree that Mr. Hong, our local guide, had just pointed out as the bird’s favorite perch. We’d added Brown Dipper, Mandarin Duck, and White-crowned Forktail to our burgeoning lists even before sitting down to our first noodles.
The following morning, Christmas Day, we had excellent studies of a vocal Hwamei and four Long-billed Plovers, and then, just as Mr. Hong had promised, Scaly-sided Mergansers flew in right on cue. These first individuals performed well, but not nearly as well as the ones we’d find less than an hour later a short distance farther upstream. Add in a couple of Crested Kingfishers, impressive numbers of Red-billed Starlings, half-a-dozen Yellow-browed Buntings, eight Masked Laughingthrushes, a handful of Siberian Rubythroats, and some gorgeous rural scenery, and, while we weren’t the only people in town celebrating Christmas, we were probably the only ones wearing party hats and doing a bird list!
We were lucky and avoided the fog that can plague Poyang Hu, our next port of call. We were less lucky with our choice of hotel, however. Qingyu had received a phone call from the hotel management the day before we arrived informing her that the hotel’s restaurant was being renovated. What they’d omitted to tell her was that the entire hotel was shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins, that the lobby was a death trap of cables and wires, and that the only thing that was ready for us were the seven rooms we occupied. They were indeed lovely rooms, but we changed the very next morning to a hotel that had been granted a special dispensation to host foreigners. Qingyu was amazingly resourceful, but by this time we’d come to expect no less.
Poyang Hu lived up to, and even surpassed, some of our expectations. It’s notoriously difficult to estimate numbers in large flocks of birds, but we certainly had plenty of practice and, in this respect, Shahu, hosting tens of thousands of birds, was particularly outstanding. Here among the almost 5,000 Tundra Swans, thousands of geese including up to 1,500 Swan Geese, tens of thousands of ducks with Falcated Duck, Eurasian Wigeon, Northern Pintail, and Common Teal all being particularly well represented, up to 4,000 Eurasian Spoonbills, and of course the 1,350 Oriental Storks (45% of the world population at this one site alone!) we managed to find a few rarities. Chief among the latter were the 100 Baikal Teal, a dozen or so Smew, and a single Dalmatian Pelican, that last one of perhaps just 50 birds found in the entire entire East Asian flyway! Needless to say, Poyang Hu’s cranes were our chief quarry, and we found all four expected species, with Siberian, White-naped, and eventually Hooded Cranes all well represented and each performing superbly. Add to these the parties of Lesser White-fronted Geese, the huge numbers of Spotted Redshank and Pied Avocet, the larks and pipits, and the time we spent trying to extricate ourselves from the river’s sand banks dissolves away…
It was significantly colder in coastal Jiangsu, but the birds didn’t seem to mind. The hoped-for Red-crowned Cranes, only recently designated China’s National Bird, performed better than we had dared hope, as, eventually, did our other main target at Yancheng Nationa Nature Reseve, the exquisite Reed Parrotbill. It also took us a while to find our first Chinese Gray Shrike, but we eventually stumbled across two, the first one being our last new bird of 2007. We also struggled to see Saunders’s Gull, the world’s rarest larid. Not definitively seen at our semi-regular site north of Yancheng, three birds were found on our unscheduled excursion south to the Père David’s Deer Reserve in Dafeng county. Most of us also caught up with Pale Thrush that day; the others had to wait only until we visited a park on the edge of Shanghai the next morning. This park, surprisingly devoid of human but not avian visitors, also held four Yellow-bellied Tits, impressive numbers of Gray-backed and White’s Thrushes, and our last new bird of the tour, an exquisite male Japanese Thrush.
We explored a tiny fraction of Shanghai city later that afternoon, rode on the high speed Maglev train, had a short walk along and then traveled under the world-famous Bund, and even found time to go souvenir shopping.
How many of us knew, in advance of our trip, quite what to expect of modern-day China, and how many of us went home with altered opinions about 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 an enviable work ethic. The time to visit China is right now, and we were privileged indeed to see some of the more impressive parts of it.
Paul Holt and Wang Qingyu
Updated: March 2008