Morbid migration

Setting up illegal nets to trap migratory birds and selling them for meat or as pets is big in China. Every year during this season, volunteers rescue hundreds of thousands of birds. But now volunteers are afraid of setting the birds free again, in fear they might run into more illegal nets.

Among eight major global migration paths for birds, three pass through China. Every October, as hundreds of thousands of birds fly south, a season of hunting and killing also starts in China. From northeast China to Tianjin and then to the Beibu Gulf along the South China Sea, these lines have become a bloody journey plagued by poachers driven by profit and market demand.

This year is no exception. Around the just- passed national holiday, volunteers dedicated to protecting birds spotted over 5,000 birds trapped in two huge illegal bird- hunting areas in Tianjin and Tangshan, Hebei Province. They tore down kilometers of nets and saved 3,000 birds, including many endangered wild birds.

Bloody paths

It is a scene that most people would find too horrible to look at.

In early October, when volunteers found the illegal bird- hunting area in a remote marshy part of Tianjin, they also found many trapped birds dead or dying in nets, with the bodies of even more birds abandoned and decomposing on the ground. Occasionally the scream of birds pierced the deathly stillness.

From the end of September, the volunteers with several environmentalprotection organizations, including the foundation Let Birds Fly, began travelling around the boundary area of Tianjin and Tangshan. Altogether they found and demolished bird nets that came to an astonishing total of over 20,000 meters long.

Knit together with black nylon wire, each net is about eight meters long and one meter tall, fixed to bamboo poles at either end, and they line up closely to form a dense trap. Birds that are trapped by the net, though they don’t get hurt immediately, suffer as they hang on the nets for days on end.

Among the reeds were also scattered electric speakers that mimic the calls of birds to attract them into the nets. Some of the speakers use frequencies so high that humans cannot hear.

When the volunteers saved the trapped birds, many other birds were soon caught again in the net. They needed to clear every single net from the area to ensure the animals’ safety, which became a main task.

Tian Zhiwei, a volunteer with the Wild Life Protection Association of Leting county, Tangshan, said bird hunters fall into three categories: local farmers who want to eat the birds, wealthy people who see bird- hunting as sport and professional bird hunters, or bird dealers.

Tian told the Procuratorial Daily that professional bird hunters are the most destructive to birds. They are equipped with more

sophisticated equipment and track migrating birds over the long term. Behind these hunters is usually a big black market, which put the birds either on dining tables or in cages. He believes the nets in Tianjin were set up by these professionals.

As a matter of fact, the footprints of such bird hunters can be found far beyond Tianjin. As a nationwide survey conducted by Let Birds Fly shows, from September 25 to the middle of October, there were at least 30 cases in which wild birds were harmed and such nets were discovered.

Meeting market demand

In the follow- up investigation over illegal hunting, the volunteers and government officials found a large quantity of dead migratory birds and birds traps in a Tangshan village. More than 2,500 birds packaged in plastic bags, were stuffed in two big refrigerators.

According to law enforcement officials, the wild birds were fattened up and suffocated to death and were about to be sent to dinner tables of southern China.

Migrating birds are usually pretty thin. To get a good price, bird dealers feed these birds tons of medicine and antibiotics to help make them gain weight quickly and then kill them.

Some birds, whose meat is unfortunately regarded by Chinese people as having medicinal effects, have suffered from intense hunting in the past half century. The yellow- crested bunting, seen by some as the “ginseng of the sky,” has gradually become an endangered species due to huge demand for their meat.

As Liu Yidan, a famous volunteer devoted to protecting wild birds, told Southern Weekend, the huge profits available is the biggest reason bird hunters set out to catch so many birds.

A volunteer from Hebei once revealed to media that while the farmers make only 1,000 yuan ($ 153) by planting rice every year, hunting birds in their rice fields for a season could earn them 20,000 yuan.

Bird- hunting is just the first link on the black profit chain of the migrating bird trade. It is a business that requires almost no capital to enter. A few dozen yuan can buy one electronic bird callers, nets and bamboo poles that can last them a whole season. At the end of the chain, a yellow- breasted bunting can be sold for