Nine months later I found myself on board a British Airways Dreamliner, grateful that Chinese economic expansion had tempted the company to offer direct flights from London.
It was dawn on Wednesday 11th May and we were circling Chengdu, the capital of the south-western province of Sichuan. A glance at a map of China reveals that there are many cities the size of Chengdu plus many that are much larger. Shanghai now has an estimated population of 34 million people. I was shocked to discover that Chengdu has a population of over 18 million and that there are 15 cities in China larger than London, with populations of over 10 million people. 1.38 billion Chinese have to live somewhere and increasingly where they live is in huge sprawling cities. Rural migration into the cities has reached the point where parents leave their child at home to be raised by it’s grandparents, the so-called “left-behind children“, while they search for work in the cities. In poor populations it still is usually the case that there is only one child per couple, despite the state relaxing the One Child policy on 1st January 2016 to allow two children before a fine is imposed.
Bird deaths at the airport
But it wasn’t the population of the city below me that first attracted my attention.It was the size of the roads. Even from the air I could see 6, 8 and 10 lane superhighways, vast, wide roads. This was a country trying to catch up with the needs of its ever growing population. The consequence of millions of people recently becoming able to afford cars generated the second thing to strike me: air pollution. There was a yellowish haze settled over the city. Only objects in the near distance appeared remotely clear, the buildings in the far distance were nearly invisible in the smog. I was already looking forward to leaving town and we hadn’t even landed yet.
Unfortunately landing produced an even more depressing spectacle. Along the far side of the airport were long lines of mist nets, each several meters high and each holding the bodies of hundreds of slowing dying birds. These nets have been erected to prevent bird strikes on aircraft. Unfortunately they only seem to catch much smaller birds, ones that could not possibly pose a threat to a rotating jet turbine engine or the passengers on board. These birds are attracted to the only large area of grass around the city and this story is repeated at airports across the country (see this Birding Beijing article). This proved to be our first experience of many Chinese state projects, done on the sort of massive scale that only a dictatorship can actualise. In China, the state owns all land. Whilst an individual may own a house, the state can decide to drive an 18 lane superhighway through your valley leaving you with nothing but a compensation claim.
Having the potential for absolute control inevitably leads to absolute state paranoia. For the visiting birder this can also have consequences. For example, there are no large scale maps available. Only the state has access to this information. The tourist is just left with nice colourful small scale tourist maps. Visiting tourists are also unable to drive in China (unless they want to go through the process of acquiring a Chinese driving licence). After some research and some discussion between Ian (in Adelaide, Australia) and myself (in Oxford, UK) we decided that we would see more birds if we used someone who knew the birding sites and could also act as driver and translator. Roland Zeidler was our man.
Plastic fantastic
I arrive at Chengdu airport and was processed with incredible efficiency. However, I was greeted (image below) with a scene of a plastic, idealised version of nature: Pandas at play. This is something that it would appear the Chinese authorities are striving for in their management of their national parks. This theme would reoccur throughout our stay in Sichuan.
Nature must be neat, with wild animals gambling quietly on sun dappled lawns. Paradoxically, it is an almost simplistic Disney inspired version of the natural world, which has nothing to do with biodiveristy, habitat protection or the complex wild, wet, insect and bug laden systems that have evolved over millions of years and supports a billion forms of life, but which human activity seems intent on reducing to nothing in a matter of generations.
My bag was the first one out and 30 minutes after landing Roland ran through arrivals to met me. Roland is a genuinely nice guy. A gentle man, whose natural Germanic organisational skills run up against the steel wall of Chinese state bureaucracy on a regular basis. Naturally such frustration will build up and occasionally spill out, sometimes leading to amusing outbursts. To hear Roland’s German accent cursing the Chinese destruction of forest with choice phrases such as “Zees people should be shot in zee head!” or upon seeing the horrendous plastic Las Vegas style township in Jaizhougou and grimly sighing “One bomb izz not enough” was very amusing. And we agreed with every word. Roland is also a good birder, knows most of the calls and can use payback to bring the trickier birds out. We estimate that Roland enabled us to see at least 60% more species than if we had visited the birding sites independently and gone in without a guide.
As Ian was not arriving from Australia, via Hong Kong, until that evening Roland and I went birding in Chengdu for the afternoon. We first stopped at the river, just south of the largest building on earth (in terms of volume). There is nothing else I can add about this building, it is just one huge block of steel and glass. I believe there is a beach complete with waves inside. The view from the river:
I had my first good looks at Asian Red-rumped Swallow, with their distinctive heavily streaked breasts:
The local doves were Spotted, the local finches were Grey-headed Greenfinches and there were White-cheeked Starlings, Plain Prinias, Long-tailed Shrikes, Crested Mynas and Vineous-throated Parrotbills in the bushes. The margins of the river held Little Egrets, Chinese Pond Herons and Night Herons, plus Little Ringed Plover and Common Sandpiper.
In the late afternoon we visited the Bailu Wan Wetland in south east Chengdu. This was a rather more scenic spot, though once again a sanitised version of nature and the sprawling city loomed, never far from sight:
Chinese Grosbeaks, Black-winged Cuckoo-Shrike and Oriental Magpie Robin were the highlights:
All hotel rooms begin with an 8
That evening we picked up Ian from Chengdu airport. Roland then gives us some great news. Sid has called to say there is at least one Blackthroat singing at Wolong. This is one of our major targets, but with the usual sites being inaccessible it would have required a 10-12 hour drive each way to stand a chance of seeing one of the world’s rarest and least known birds. To have one (or more?!) singing at a site just 2 hours away, meant a rapid but essential change to our itinerary. We decide to visit Wolong the very next day and overnight at a hotel in Roland’s home town of Dujiangyan.
Dujiangyan gave us our first experience of Chinese hotels and their obsession with superstition surrounding the “lucky” number 8. We were given rooms numbered 8405 and 8406. But when we entered the lift there were only 6 floors in the hotel. Roland explained that the number 8 is seen as a lucky number in China and therefore all Chinese room numbers begin with number 8. So we had to go to the fourth floor and find rooms 405 and 406 and ignore the 8. Similarly, hotels will try to get as many 8s into their phone numbers and wifi passwords as possible. We quickly noticed that often the wifi password were eight 8s in a row. In fact on a couple of occasions we didn’t even ask for the password, but just entered eight 8s and were logged on. This makes having a wifi password seem somewhat redundant: if in China just try eight 8s.
I hit the pillow at 1am, the alarm set for 4:40am. Having only had 90 minutes sleep on the plane the previous night, I was not not looking forward to hearing my alarm the following morning. Except that it would mean we were heading for Wolong!
