Biodiversity Diary a trip to Tianjin Wetlands — John MacKinnon

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B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

Black-winged stilt

Avocet

Black-tailed Godwit

Whiskered tern Amur falcon

Sharp-tailed sandpipers

Eastern curlew

Mixed flocks of waders

Wetlands of Tianjin It is just two hours drive from Beijing and even less if you take the high speed train to Tianjin - the nearest coast to the capital. Tianjin and its offspring Tangu and Hangu is a large busy town of industrial development and docklands – not exactly a beauti-ful wilderness and not perhaps where you would expect to go to find wildlife. But the coastline in front of the city is directly on the great East Asian migration flyway where hun-dreds of thousands of shorebirds and raptors pass by each spring and autumn on their annual migra-tions between northern summer breeding grounds and their southern wintering areas.

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Some species breed way up in the Arctic, some species migrate as far south as Austra-lia, others are less extreme in their move-ments. But all depend heavily on stopping and feeding points along the way. Many birders have realized that the coastal holiday town of Beidahe another two hours north of Tianjin is a great place to see passage rap-tors and passerines but less well known and are the great mudflats that attract so many waders and other shorebirds. Perhaps even more surprising than these great armies of birds visiting so close to a major city is the fact that the shoreline itself is highly polluted and in a state of constant change. Plastic waste, sewage, oil from the many fishing boats and the accumulated dis-charge of the Hai He river must surely make this an unhealthy feeding grounds but the huge price of rental for factory space is driv-ing a new process of land reclamation on a massive scale.

Biodiversity Diary

ECBP Newsletter Supplements May 1-2 2010

Fishing fleet at the ready

Gull-billed tern Kentish plover

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Feeding among the silt and pollution Developers enclose the sea and beach with new dykes, then fill the resulting polders with mud dradged from the sea floor. A huge labour of compressing the mud, extracting the salt and water and consolidating the new land with tubes of sand proceeds at a furious pace. We vis-ited on the Sunday of a Labour Day holi-day but at 0700 hrs there were already thousands of workmen and hundreds of lorries and pumps in action. Ponds that

had been great for birds the year before were already construction sites for new factories and the birds were pushed fur-ther out to sea and further along the coastline.

To the north of Tangu, Hangu the coast is wilder and we found huge flocks of Red knots, Curlew sandpipers, Black-headed gulls, several species of plovers and curlews and many species of stints and sandpipers. Most were far from acces-sible but we met other parties of birdwatchers with spotting scopes ticking of the species and totting up the numbers. From time to tome an Amur falcon would glide past looking for un-wary birds. Along the smaller albeit polluted

B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

Redshank

Muriel manages a smile

Marsh sandpiper

Whimbrel

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B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

creeks flowing down to the coast we could get closer to Eastern Curlew, Whimbrel, dainty Avo-cets and Marsh Sandpipers. I was happy to get passable pictures of godwits, Gull-billed terns and the rare Saunders’ Gull. We lunched at a sea-food restaurant. If the birds could take the pollution every day, maybe I could survive one meal !!

The second day of our visit we went south of the City to the reservoir lakes of Beida-gang. Our hosts were all keen bird pho-tographers and their massive lenses made my own smaller tackle look rather pa-thetic. But here we found also a great many birds including freshwater species nesting and hunting among the reedbeds that were different from the shorebirds on the saline mudbars.

White Peduncularis

Former

wetlands

being

reclaimed for

development

lands Gangs of diggers in the mud

Fishermen on reservoir

Consolidating with sand tubes

Bordering dyke

Finding oil under the mud

Pumping in new mud

P A G E 6 Mine is bigger than yours ! We were happy to find some non-water birds such as flocks of redstarts, scaly thrush and a splendid rufous-bellied woodpecker. We watched as an Eastern marsh Harrier glided silently over the reeds, pounced on a smaller bird and then sat to eat it. Whiskered terns and Black-winged stilts were breeding in the wetlands and the air was filled with their shrill cries. Small flocks of mal-lard and spot-billed ducks flew over-head.

My guest for the weekend was Muriel Vives who supervises the ECBP VAC programme from her office in Beijing. She was on a back stopping mis-sion to China and hoped to see some beautiful countryside before returning to Belgium. Well it was not quite what she was expecting and did not match up to the beautiful scenery of Nei Menggu and Xinjiang I had sent her earlier but when time is short it is still nice to get out of Beijing and see some wildlife. She got her sunglasses on and could walk along the dykes amid screaming gulls and terns.

Whiskered tern

B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

A T R I P T O T I A N J I N

Saunders

Gull

Scaly thrush

New breed of

Chinese birders

Bird hunters

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Curlew sandpipers

Black-tailed godwit

Black-winger stilt

Harrier hunting over the reed-beds

EU-China Biodiversity Programme Add: Rm. 503, Environmental Conventions Building, No.5 Houy-ingfang Hutong, Xicheng District, Beijing. 100035, P.R. China Fax: (+8610) 8220 5421 Email: info@ecbp.cn