The loneliness of the Chinese birdwatcher

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A tale of the for the Chinese crested tern, possibly the world’s rarest bird.




The early Chinese conquerors called them barbarians, for they drilled their teeth and went barefoot; a poet, despising their sharp voices, dubbed them shrike-tongued. Today the Chinese still look down on the Li but esteem them as hunters. “Bow and knife never leave their hands,” wrote a Song dynasty chronicler; or mist nets, a modern chronicler might add. By the side of the road, Li men, young and old, hold clusters of wild birds by the legs, waving them as we roar past. We skid to a halt and I get out for a closer look.

The Li men jostle to sell me supper, all of it live: white-breasted waterhens, little egrets, a black-crowned night heron and a spot-billed duck, the only duck where male and female look alike. Upright, herons and their egret cousins have the gaunt, hunched air of sharp-eyed spinsters dressed for an Edwardian salon. Hung upside down, they turn limp, resigned to their fate except for the occasional mild jab at their captor’s hand. I have not eaten of the family. But I did once (in a Guangzhou restaurant that kept herons, civet cats and a live donkey in the store room) accept a bite of cormorant, which must be similar, and it is nothing to write home about. As I turn back to the shiny car, one of the old vendors in a torn T-shirt and shorts is disdainful. “Ta kan ye bu mai!” he spits. “He looks and doesn’t even buy anything.”

China is not a good place to be a bird.

But the rise of an entirely new species in China brings hope to conservationists: the mainland birdwatcher.

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