Bird-watching with Chinese characteristics.
That’s the only way I can describe my recent trip to Zhalong Nature Reserve in search of the rare red-crowned crane and other birds.
Several years ago, I clipped an article about this 500,000-acre wetland in China’s far northeastern province called Heilongjiang. Since then, I’ve been hearing the siren-song of reed beds stretching to the horizon and cranes silhouetted in the sky, including 9 of the world’s 15 or so extant species.
It’s summer, the best time to view the birds, as they have migrated back from all over Asia to breed. It’s also stultifyingly hot and humid in Shanghai, so my husband John, son Alex (he’s 23), and I figured the time was ripe for a trip to the northern marshes.
As a Shanghainese friend once pointed out, China is shaped like a chicken. Heilongjiang Province is the head, tucked up into Siberia. The dingy town of Qiqihar and the Zhalong Reserve lie along its western edge, near the border shared with Inner Mongolia.
We set out early in the morning from the city of Harbin to Qiqihar. Three hours by train, 30 minutes by taxi past small villages where fresh-cut reeds were drying in stacks, and we were delivered to the gate of the reserve’s visitors’ center by late morning.
Over the next few hours, we saw dozens of cranes, magnificent creatures flying overhead in groups, calling to each other, their long legs trailing. We watched them run flapping and crying and they prepared to lift off. Our hearts and hopes for their future survival soared along with them. And I managed to take a few astonishing photos.
But, as we all know, photos don’t necessarily tell the story. The bird-watching experience wasn’t quite what we had expected, and visiting the Zhalong Reserve was a far cry from visiting a nature reserve at home in the States. I snapped other photos that help tell the real story.
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After a brief stop to check in at the only hotel, we popped into the tourist center. They assistants could not provide maps of the trails through the park nor any field guides to the birds, but a smiling woman pointedly told us “2:30 feng fei.” We recognized the word for “fly,” but didn’t quite get her meaning.
When we wandered out onto a boardwalk under construction, we located the cranes – huddled together in pens. Dismayed to find the birds held captive, we were nonetheless pleased to get a close look at them – rough red spots in lieu of feathers on the tops of their heads, black and white feathers on their bodies, crazy long legs, and scary sharp beaks.
Off to the side of the crane pens, construction workers were hefting rocks to plant a stone staircase up a man-made hill. In fact, there was a lot of construction all over the visitors’ area, pavilions underway along the boardwalk and muddy mounds of earth piled in the marsh, with tracks from a backhoe or other large machine everywhere. The lawnmower engine of a small cart — Alex called it a “pollution machine” — belched smoke and drowned out the sound of the marsh while we studied the birds.
We started off along a boardwalk over the marsh (all told, about a mile long), pausing for a lunch of Russian bread and sausage that we had packed in Harbin. Birdsong emanated up from the sea of reeds, and tern-like birds darted around. A pair of black and white birds with long vermilion legs fussed and dived angrily at us until we moved on. Further along, a hawk with banded tail and a catlike cry also tried to chase us back.
A little before 2:30, we returned to the crane pens, where a small crowd had gathered. I wondered whether the Chinese tourists thought we looked just as odd as we found their outdoor attire. There we were in out hiking pants and boots; there they were in high heels and short skirts, long gloves and umbrellas for sun protection.
Promptly at 2:30, the crane keepers, a man and a woman dressed in camouflage and brandishing very long sticks, opened the doors to half the cages and prodded the birds to step outside. The cranes hustled forward in a crowd as if at the start of a cross-country meet. With encouragement from another keeper, they took off running, squawking, and flapping, and were soon airborne above the thrilled crowd. One poor bird, still caged, took off running and flapping, too, only to hit the sides of his pen and fall back. For a few minutes, we watched in awe, ooh-ing and aah-ing as we glimpsed the majestic creatures in the air, crossing the vast marsh where we humans could hardly move through the muck.
And after about fifteen minutes, it was over. Responding to a keeper’s calls, the large birds returned earthward, lured by fish strewn on the ground. Tourists rushed up to get their photos made, each person leaning toward a crane. Then the keepers, waving their poles, herded the birds back into their pens. A few stragglers lingered, and I wondered whether they were recalling some dim ancestral memory of a time when cranes flew free and caught their own fish. Might they take off again? But the female keeper was ruthless, chasing them down with her stick. When she whacked a bird just in front of me, I yelped involuntarily.
After the show, we returned to the tourist center, where the same smiling young woman told us that there were no trails other than the boardwalk we had already covered. We couldn’t wander into the marsh. Even if we had been wearing waders instead of hiking boots, we would have sunk deep into mud, with reeds above our heads, unable to see any landmarks. So we looped the boardwalk again. enjoying the birdsong, the quiet, and the lack of other tourists. This time we startled a golden eagle. A bit later, back at the visitors’ complex, we took a look inside “The Building of Crane,” a small room with smeared glass cases exhibiting a few gnawed-looking stuffed birds, some toppled over.
The evening’s dinner offering consisted of an iffy meal of rice and disturbing chunks of fish swimming in a brown sauce, which we suspected were leftovers picked up off the ground after the cranes disdained them. We would have been grateful if our hotel’s bathroom had come with towels, or electricity, or even hot water. As it was, I was grateful that I’d brought bug repellent. The mosquitoes weren’t so bad, but the spray is probably what kept all the cockroaches off us.
Still, we were lulled to sleep by a peaceful chorus of frogs under our window. And we gloried in another morning stroll on the boardwalk among the swallows and terns, watching lone fishermen pole their small skiffs through the reeds. That is, until the constructions workers’ go-cart started up its racket next to the crane pens and idle workers greeted the morning by joyriding from one construction site to the other.
Around 9:00 a.m., a busload of young uniformed officers from the People’s Liberation Army emptied out and they began taking turns posing for their photos at the Reserve entrance. But by the time of the next feng fei show (“set free to fly,” we realized) at 10:30, we were long gone to catch the train back to Harbin.
So what is the future of China’s cranes? I don’t know any more than I did before our trip. Is there a program to breed the birds and re-introduce them to the wild? Certainly not the ones we saw. The reserve offered no explanatory exhibitions and no one to answer questions, merely The Building of Crane’s dusty bodies. I can only hope that, somewhere deep in the other 499,995 acres of the Zhalong Nature Reserve, China’s cranes are breeding in peace and with wild abandon.
