Protecting flying friends
Wildlife enthusiast strives to ensure well-being of migratory birds during their stopovers around Beijing
Every spring and autumn, migratory birds shuttling between Poyang Lake in East China’s Jiangxi province and Siberia spend a short time in Beijing before continuing their trip southward or northward.
Guanting Reservoir on the border of Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, and west of the Yanqing district of Beijing, is one of their habitats, where they stay for six weeks or so regaining their stamina.
Those months are also among the busiest for Li Li, founder of the Black Leopard Wildlife Conservation Station, and his co-workers. They need to monitor the number of birds in the reservoir, identify species and do health checks, and ensure they are not disturbed or hurt.
“We can tell how good the habitat is for the birds as well as the local biodiversity through analyzing these data,” Li said, adding that the workers record the data and report it to the China Wildlife Conservation Association, which is led by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
The team’s work includes deterring potential poachers, transferring weak or injured birds to veterinarians for treatment and replenishing food for the birds during bad weather, such as heavy snowfall that lasts for days.
Li, who founded the wildlife conservation service in 2000, said his team has recorded more than 300 kinds of migratory birds, of which the most seen include the whooper swan, the whistling swan, the mute swan and various kinds of wild geese and ducks.
The Black Leopard workers usually record about 30,000 to 40,000 migratory birds stopping in the reservoir every spring, but the number this spring has exceeded 60,000, Li said.
That is because the birds, during their travel southward, left Beijing early last year, as they found it too cold. So they spent more time in the warmer south before heading north later, Li said.
“They have enjoyed a very good rest in the south. So this spring we saw them (in Beijing) with stronger physique, better vigor and brighter feather,” Li added.
Recording the migratory birds is a small part of Black Leopard’s very busy workload. The civil organization’s work covers the mountainous suburbs between Hebei and northwest and southwest Beijing, which are rich in wildlife.
It has set up about 110 infrared cameras there and dispatches its members and volunteers to patrol the regions to survey biodiversity, guard against poaching and maintain the cameras.
Such patrols can be dangerous because during the hikes, usually of between eight and 15 kilometers, the workers sometimes have to walk on riverbeds, exposed to the risks of floods, to get to their destinations, Li said.
But their effort is well recompensed. In addition to boars and roe deer drinking by the river, one can watch from the mountain top predator birds soaring, and “thousands of” migratory birds, such as common cranes, flying by during migratory seasons, a scene that is “very beautiful and spectacular”, Li said.
Common cranes, as well as swans and black storks, are the birds that Black Leopard focuses its work on, Li said. The black stork is a wild species that enjoys first-class State protection.
The Beijing Municipal Forestry and Parks Bureau says that there are only about 3,000 black storks worldwide, of which about 1,000 are in China.
Black storks inhabit the reaches of the Juma River in the Fangshan district of Southwest Beijing, as a result of the region’s “superior natural conditions”, the bureau said. In 2014, the China Wildlife Conservation Association conferred on the district the title “the hometown for black storks in China”.
Li, who established a program to protect black storks along the river, said he has witnessed an increase in
their population in the region.
From April to June every year black storks lay eggs and hatch them by the river. Li said he and his co-workers have the task of watching out for the birds’ nests and preventing tourists from scaring or hurting them through activities such as lighting fireworks.
Yet local people may not be especially fond of black storks at first. Li recalled that a fish farmer asked for his help sometime before 2008 because the birds kept preying on his fancy carp, even though he lit firecrackers in an attempt to drive them away.
Li told him to increase the height of the fish pool’s brick walls and get the level of water in it to rise to at least 80 centimeters. He did, and stopped losing his fish to the birds.
Li and his team also spend a lot of time in preventing other wild animals, such as vultures and boars, from wrecking livestock and crop plants.
Every year migrating vultures come to stay in mountains on the outskirts of Beijing for two months around Spring Festival and attack local people’s goats.
They scare goats, which are grazing on the cliff and not being watched by a shepherd, by diving suddenly toward them and prey on those falling off the cliff, Li said.
As a result, Li asks visiting friends and others to bring intestines of chicken and fish as well as rotten meat for his team to put in places away from the goats, so that the vultures will leave the goats in peace.
Also, in springs and autumns for the past eight years, Black Leopard workers have gone to a remote village nestled in mountains in Hebei to help prevent boars from ravaging villagers’ crop fields.
Boars began to pose a serious issue more than 10 years ago, Zhao Chunjiang, 51, an official of the village, said.
The animals come to the village every year and destroy farmland, most of which is planted with corn, Zhao said.
Villagers have to bang a gong and watch out for several hours at night to keep the boars away. “If we left them alone, there would be nothing left to harvest,” Zhao said. But the boars keep coming back.
Li and his teammates have developed several methods to tackle the problem. They patrol the mountains and have hung laser disks that deflect sunlight to disrupt the boars’ vision.
Li’s friends working in zoos mailed him excrement of North China leopards, which feed on boars, and Li placed it in the crop fields. The team has also used a loudspeaker and played recordings of wolves howling aggressively.
Such methods work temporarily but fail to root out the problem, Zhao said.
As destructive as boars can be, it is illegal to hunt them, except for a small number of people who are on government-approved hunting activities.
One reason is that boars are on the list of terrestrial wild animals that are “helpful or of value” and protected by the State.
“The boars are breeding too quickly,” Zhao said. “They don’t have a natural enemy in our region.”
But for Li, the wildlife protector, change may be on the way. The increase in boar numbers may attract wild North China leopards to the region from a nearby nature reserve in Hebei, thus keeping the number of the boars in check, he said.
The introduction of the leopards will further improve biodiversity in Beijing and make it “very sound and healthy”, he said, adding that humans and wildlife can and should coexist.
Li said that when he was about 18, shortly after graduating from the high school affiliated to Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, he gave up higher education at the academy and founded the Black Leopard Wildlife Conservation Station.
The 39-year-old, born and raised in a village by the South Third Ring Road in Beijing until he was in grade six, said life in the village had a major influence on the career he chose.
“In the village there were greenhouses, crop fields and large fields of canola flowers. My pastimes were climbing trees, watching how bird eggs hatched, how little birds grew, and how tadpoles turned into frogs.”
The station fared poorly in its first years, and in 2005 only three workers were left, including Li. In the same year he opened a gallery and started funding the station’s work by selling paintings.
The team, which lacked professional know-how and wildlife protection skills, trained with the Wildlife Conservation Society from 2007 to 2013 and took part in several of the society’s projects in China, Li said.
In 2014 the station joined the China Wildlife Conservation Association’s service to protect wild birds and became a partner of the World Wide Fund for Nature, Li said. It now has 12 members and more than 2,000 volunteers.