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.

Read also the abstract of an article in the New Yorker from earlier this year by author Jonathan Franzen about bird-watching in China.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animals, bird-watching, rare animals
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First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China’s worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.

As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday’s quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn’t these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?

“If the seismological bureau were professional enough they could have predicted the earthquake ten days earlier, when several thousand cubic meters of water disappeared within an hour in Hubei, but the bureau there dismissed it,” one commentator wrote. In fact, seismologists say, it is nearly impossible to predict when and where an earthquake will strike.

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, animals, online forums
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Chinese cat lovers mobilized online to save a truck load of cats from the cooking pot, a newspaper reported Tuesday. Veteran Shanghai cat rescuer Duo Zirong started off her mission Friday when she called police to stop a truck stuffed with some 800 live cats, the China Daily said.

The standoff happened at a parking lot in a southern suburb of Shanghai. It continued for hours while cat lovers spread word of the incident online, eventually raising $1,320 in donations to buy the whole load. They now hope to place them in homes after posting their pictures and profiles on the Internet. [Full Text]

See also: China cat-lovers save felines from dinner tables from Channelnewsasia.com.

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animals, Internet forum, Shanghai
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Experts have warned of environmental pollution from increased animal husbandry, as the country became the world’s top meat and egg producer last year.

“Domestic animal and poultry waste has become a major source of environmental pollution,” Oriental Outlook Weekly quoted Wu Weixiang, associate professor with Zhejiang University‘s College of Agriculture, as saying in its latest issue.

Wu said animal husbandry in China produces 2.7 billion tons of animal and poultry waste every year, 3.4 times its industrial solid waste….[Full Text]

-Photo:Ducks on a fish pond in Yangliu Village, Lujiang County, Anhui Province. Zhou Yuedong.

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animals, poultry waste
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A worker at the Xi’an Qinling Wildlife park in Santa Claus costume feed monkeys in Xi’an, western China’s Shaanxi Province, on December 27, 2006. [Link Here]

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animals, Christmas, photos
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More male Asian elephants in China will be born without tusks because poaching of tusked elephants is reducing the gene pool, a recent study predicts.

Research by Zhang Li, an associate professor of zoology with the college of life sciences at Beijing Normal University, discovered that the gene for tusklessness is spreading among the endangered species in its habitat in Yunnan Province of Southwest China.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animal protection, animals, elephants, poaching
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