Nesting in the cool wetlands
From mid-November to March, Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve hosts migratory birds
Crouching in the cool of the quiet wetlands, Yang Bin patiently awaits his prey. His intentions are peaceful: All the shooting he has done for the past 20 years involved a camera.
Yang wants to welcome the elegant annual guests he has photographed in the past — migratory waterfowl, such as Oriental storks, which come in large groups to dance in the Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve in Dongying, Shandong province.
This October, the 48-year-old Yang, a native of Dongying, observed some of the storks, along with red-crowned cranes and some other birds. They were the first to arrive.
“It’s like an annual greeting. I wait for them and record their life here,” he said, adding that the birds come because the living environment in the reserve is better than other places.
“From the middle of November to
March the next year, the reserve will be home to countless birds. It’s very common to see thousands of them in one photo,” Yang said.
The nature reserve, situated where the Yellow River flows into the Bohai Sea, was established in 1992. It covers about 153,000 hectares, with the wetland making up 70 percent.
It is an important stop for millions of migratory birds on their global journey. Last year, more than 6 million birds stopped at the reserve.
President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, inspected the estuary of the Yellow River in Dongying, including the nature reserve, on Oct 20.
An outline for the basin’s protection and development through 2030, which was released in early October by the central government, calls for protection and restoration of wetlands at the lower reaches of the Yellow River Delta.
In recent years, local governments have been putting protection of the reserve at the top of their priorities and released detailed action plans.
“We are taking water bodies, forests, farmland, lakes, grasslands, wetlands, coastlines and beaches into consideration in building a wetland-themed ecosystem,” Chen Bichang, mayor of Dongying, said on Oct 9.
Since 2017, more than 18,800 hectares of wetlands have been restored. “Before the improvements, some of the ponds were separated, and water couldn’t flow. We called them dead water,” Chen said.
The wetland is now home to 1,630 animal species and 685 species of plants. Bird species have increased from 187 to 371, according to the management committee of the reserve.
Xu Mingde, the committee’s director, said 306 Oriental storks, an endangered species, were born in 2019 alone, a major jump from 2005, when only seven were born there.
The wetland has become the largest breeding ground in the world for Oriental storks and the second-largest for Saunders’s gulls, Xu said.