Birdwatching at Poyang Lake, China

If China is a waking giant, some parts must still be asleep.
Having a meeting in Qingdao, I decided to add a few more days for bird watching at Poyang Lake, is the largest freshwater lake in China.
Poyang Lake, “the last lake of clear water,” is famous among birders and conservationists. In winter it hosts almost the entire world populations of Siberian cranes and oriental white storks, together with four other species of crane and hundreds of thousands of other waterbirds. It is a National Nature Reserve, a Ramsar site (designated under the under the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance), and an IBA (Important Bird Area) site, and it figures prominently in virtually all of the conservation plans for endangered waterbirds in East Asia. It is only a half day’s drive from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province.
I quickly discovered that, although famous, Poyang Lake not actually easy to get to. Before leaving Canada, I had failed to find on the Internet any accommodations in or near the refuge, in the nearest town, Wu Cheng, or even in Nanchang. There were no ecotours there, and none of the tourist agencies either in Canada or China that I contacted had ever heard of it. Eventually I tracked down the email address of the Director of the reserve, a Mr. Zhang, who promised to help me get to the refuge and “take care of me.” At least, I thought he had, as his emails were not easy to decipher. Moreover, he had not replied to my query as to what I should do upon arrival, since my plane was scheduled to land at 9:30 PM.
I went without hotel reservations anyway, trusting that he would be there. He wasn’t.
The Nanchang flight’s scheduled 9:30 PM arrival was delayed almost two hours. Arriving after 11:00 PM, I found my suitcase missing and no English speakers in the small airport. My few words of Mandarin (a remnant of previous visits to China) and a Chinese-English dictionary helped with tracking the errant bag, which the airline agent finally assured me would arrive by 4:00 PM the next day. Great, I thought, already a day gone from my birdwatching and I’m not even there yet. By now it was midnight and the taxi drivers had all gone home.
The airline agent, seeing me looking uncertainly at the benches, took me by the hand—literally—and walked me two kilometres in a stiff, cold wind (it was December) two kilometres to a small, darkened hotel. He banged on the door. A sleepy, pyjama-clad young woman opened up, turned on some lights, smiled a welcome admittance, and led me to a room.
At dawn I went for a walk and quickly added some birds to my life list, before finding a savoury breakfast waiting for me at the hotel. The same young woman was at the desk. Although she was unable to find a telephone listing for the Nature Reserve, she let me use her computer to send an email to Director Zhang explaining my situation and adding, “If I have not heard from you by 1600 hours, I will hire a taxi and go to the Nature Reserve.”
At the airport, there was no reply from Director Zhang, so I sent another email. Patrons at a nearby restaurant delighted in teasing the foreigner, helped me order a plate of small, bony fish and other exquisitely delicious dishes for lunch, and told me I needed a haircut. Although perplexed, I dutifully went to the barber next door who, while trimming me, mentioned that it was her father who had given me the appearance appraisal.
My missing bag arrived at 2:00 PM, but there was still no reply from Director Zhang. The solicitous airline agent found me a taxi driver who was willing to make the trip to Wu Cheng; however, no one at the airport had ever heard of the Nature Reserve. Someone produced a good map of the county (not, however, showing the Nature Reserve), and we set off for Wu Cheng.
After two hours of rice and corn fields and a few villages where the only industry seemed to be making red mud bricks fired in rudimentary kilns, the road ended in a swampy marsh. The driver spent a long time on his mobile phone, then drove us back to the Nanchang Airport and got new directions. We drove north on a small but paved road parallel to a highway (to avoid the toll), bought supper (rice, fruit, and a different kind of fish) at a roadside stand, passed through a small city, Yong Xiu, and came to a promontory overlooking Poyang Lake.
Now it became obvious why no one knew the way to Wu Cheng. There was no road. The lake rises and falls about 7 meters with the season. At high water, Poyang Lake covers more than 5,000 km2 and Wu Cheng is on an island. As the water level falls, the giant lake shrinks to around 50 km2 and separates into many smaller lakes among which rivers wander, and grass grows on the former lake bed. The lake bed can’t be farmed, and this is why it draws nearly a million water birds from all over northern China and Siberia. Now, at the end of the dry season, we saw a vast sea of grass. Ah, but the cab driver asked local workmen and discovered that a new road was under construction, sort of a causeway across the grassy prairie.
We found it and bounced for an hour in deep ruts, dodging earth movers and graders. As the sun set, Poyang Lake closed in on both sides of the causeway. In it were standing thousands of Eurasian cranes, storks, swans, ducks, geese, and shorebirds. Every species was new on my life list. I began to perk up. An island appeared on the horizon at the end of the causeway.
Finally we reached Wu Cheng. Its only street was unlit and nearly deserted. Electricity had not yet reached this island, but that did not explain why many of the shops were shuttered. I got out and the driver, anxious to get back across the causeway before dark, quickly left.
A cold wind was blowing. I could not see a hotel or restaurant and most shops were closed. A pair of women giggled as I attempted to say “Hello” in Mandarin. My English-Chinese dictionary did not have a translation for “nature reserve,” but they understood “Where is the National Park for birds?” and pointed up the street. Shouldering my bag, I walked.
Past the town, I came to a two-story building behind an elaborate gate with a sign in English and Chinese: “Jiangxi Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve.”
A middle-aged man and young woman were just locking up for the night. The building turned out to be a guesthouse with no guests. I had not been expected, but the man got on his mobile phone to try to contact Director Zhang, whom he knew. Meanwhile, the woman showed me to a room and then walked me back into town to a tiny restaurant and ordered supper and beer. She sat down to eat only when I insisted that she join me. It was the best beer I’ve ever had.
Back at the guest house, the man said that he had telephoned the Reserve Director, who was in his office in Nanchang—there was no Nature Reserve office at Poyang Lake. The Reserve Director apologised for not meeting me at the airport—he had been unavoidably detained. He could not come, but Mr. Wang, an ecologist, would meet me tomorrow. All of this was accomplished with the aid of the English-Chinese dictionary. Things were looking up.
At dawn, I walked up to a huge, four-story, open pavilion with classic, sweeping roof lines, on the highest point of land on the island, evidently a watchtower and navigational aid. Overlooking the confluence of two rivers where a steady procession of tugs towed barges, it gave a view of vast wetlands and lakes stretching to the horizon in all directions. The combined river flows north only a little ways to the mighty Yangtze, but in the wet season, the direction reverses and overflow from the Yangtze floods into Poyang Lake. Villagers pushed handcarts piled high with produce along a short causeway to a jetty where a sampans were tied. Since ancient times until just recently, Wu Cheng was an important town that controlled shipping, the only transportation. Then about 20 years ago, the government built a highway and railroad around Poyang Lake. The town’s population plunged from about 40,000 to 2,000, explaining the deserted nature of the town.
Not for long: in 2008 the Governments of China and several provinces agreed to begin a massive Poyang Lake Project that will dampen the flood-drought cycles. Its central feature will be a dam with shipping locks and a fish passage system within sight of the Wu Chen watchtower, as well as irrigation and flood control works throughout the basin. It will limit the lake’s size to 3000 km2 and open up much of the prairie for farming. How it will affect the waterbirds and other wildlife, such as the rare Yangtze Finless River Porpoise, has not been assessed. While I was there, a scientific expedition searched in vain for another dolphin species, the Yangtze River Dolphin or baiji, throughout the Yangtze system and declared it “functionally extinct.”
In the guest house dining room, I enjoyed a huge breakfast while rare Oriental White Storks flew past the picture window. The guest house man drove me back to the causeway to wait for Mr. Wang. Eurasian and White-naped Cranes flew overhead while wading birds, shorebirds, and waterfowl dotted the lake in huge numbers.
A van drove up and disgorged half a dozen birdwatchers with spotting scopes and binoculars. One was a very petite young woman with a spotting scope and tripod almost bigger that she was.
“This is Mr. Wang,” said the guest house man, clearly losing something in the translation.
Miss Wang, Ecologist, spoke excellent English and knew every bird species. Over the next four days, she took me long hikes across the grassy prairie to an assortment of lakes, each with new bird species. We saw Siberian, Hooded, White-necked, Red-crowned and Eurasian Cranes. We passed farmers herding their water buffalo. Miss Wang arranged for a boat and boatman, who took us up and down the rivers to more distant lakes and marshes. We passed fishing families who live in houseboats on the river and row their children to Wu Chen every morning for school. We watched them using cormorants for fishing. We saw rare mammals, including the finless river dolphin and the Chinese water deer. In the town, we chatted with mothers and their toddlers and farmers bringing chickens and dripping bags of fresh tofu to the market. After an inauspicious start, it was a wonderful trip in a naturalist’s paradise.