Ranger tunes into reserve’s birdsong
URUMQI — Before the crack of dawn each day, Ayimurat Dawuletbek can be seen on the lakeside of a national wetland park in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. He moors his boat between reed marshes and sets up a telescope and a camera.
One day, having crouched for almost an hour, he focused his camera on a flock of white-headed ducks landing on the water some 100 meters away, waiting for the perfect time to photograph them. But he soon began experiencing back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs.
“I can’t get close to them as the parent birds always keep a watchful eye over their broods, which are too immature to fly. If I get too close, they would feel threatened and move from their carefully chosen home,” he says. “We shouldn’t disturb them.”
Ayimurat Dawuletbek, 36, is a ranger, bird-watcher and shutterbug at the Ulunggur Lake National Wetland Park in Fuhai county in Xinjiang’s Altay prefecture.
The park, covering over 120,000 hectares, boasts lakes, marshes and rivers, providing abundant food and an ideal location for birds.
He began working as a ranger in 2016. Without an in-depth knowledge of birds, he found it difficult to recognize them during his first few years.
“Every time a bird hovered near me, I photographed it with my mobile phone and looked it up in a bird encyclopedia after a long day at work. I sometimes sought help from experts,” he says.
Ayimurat Dawuletbek now spends most of his time wandering the park, keeping the environment clean, helping visitors and rescuing injured birds. To monitor the birds, he drives his pickup across frozen lakes in winter and scatters dried corn over known feeding locations to help them get by.
In late January, he received a phone call from a tourist notifying him that a kestrel had crashed into glass and fallen to the ground while hunting for prey. He rushed to the site and found that the bird’s right wing was slightly injured. He returned with it and provided treatment. Days later, he released the bird back into the wild.
Six years into his job, Ayimurat Dawuletbek has traveled almost every inch of the park.
He is now capable of identifying some 130 bird species by appearance and recognizing more than 50 species by their distinctive chirps.
Park authorities have taken a variety of protection measures in recent years. A patrol team consisting of 18 rangers was established and eight monitoring stations were built.
Since 2015, the local government has invested some 120 million yuan ($18.75 million) in the conservation of the wetland park. Thanks to the efforts, a total of 269 bird species had been spotted in the park by 2020, according to Zhang Yihai, head of the park’s administration.
Zhang says 162 white-headed ducks, a bird species under firstclass national protection, were spotted in the park in 2020, an increase of 157 from 2017.