Nature
First China International Birding Festival
�Outstanding Team� Bangladesh wins Azure-winged Magpie Award
by Enam Ul Haque
Just when the birds were migrating southward, a few birdwatchers from Bangladesh flew north. Their destination was Dalian, a Chinese peninsula in the Korean Bay. Dalian hosted the First China International Birding Festival from September 25 to 27.
China is known to be a land where birds are savoured as gourmet dishes, not watched as gorgeous gifts of nature. All that has been changing in the recent past. The affluent China is becoming more involved in preserving than plundering nature. China now wishes to rejoice in the abundance, variety and splendors of her birds, at least in the lovely autumn days in Dalian.
Dalian is one of the birding hot-spots of China. Local birders are rightly proud of the diversity of the resident birds of their hill-forests, scrub-jungles and coastal wetlands. In addition to that, a great number of migrating raptors come over this isthmus in autumn on their way to warmer climes in the southwest. More than a fourth of Chinas 1,330 species of birds can be seen at Dalian in this agreeable season.
Over 300 bird-watchers from all over China flocked to Dalian, although the international crowd was too small for this prodigious festival. Bird-watching is a new hobby in China; and unlike the foreigners, majority of the Chinese participants were young people sparkling with enthusiasm.
The organisers did their best to make the birding festival quite a spectacular and momentous affair. With colourful pageant, strutting band and traditional lion-dance an open-air opening ceremony was held at the edge of a hill forest. The migrating Honey Buzzards and Sparrow Hawks floated gently over the arena quite oblivious of the clamor down below. As soon as the sun went down into the water of the Korean Bay, a grand banquet at an elegant restaurant more than matched the pomp of the opening ceremony.
The main focus of the Dalian festival was a bird-race, a contest between teams to locate and identify as many species of birds as possible in the five designated sites within 24 hours. The sites were two hill-forests, two coastal wetlands and a salt-pan. Every participating team was given a car and an interpreter for doing the race. To win the bird-race a team needed several experienced bird-watchers with keen eyes and fair knowledge of the terrain they had to traverse. Most of the Chinese teams had abundant knowledge of the land and quite a few had very good knowledge of their birds. All participants were visibly seething in apprehension and anticipation.
A three-member Bangladesh Team joined the contest and even won an award! The three participants, Enam Ul Haque, Onu Tareq and Shahjahan Mridha, all members of Bangladesh Bird Club, had volunteered to miss out on the Eid festival at home to take up the challenge of a birding competition in China. Although small in number and somewhat lost in a strange land, the Bangladesh Team did not fare too badly after all. It identified 40 species of birds, including a few very rare ones. It was declared an Outstanding Team and received The Azure-winged Magpie Award.
As expected, there was a colourful concluding ceremony conducted with consummate attention to details and military precision. At the behest of the organizers, a diplomat from the Bangladesh Embassy came down to Dalian to applaud the success of the tiny Bangladesh Team. The team was later invited by the Forestry University at Kunming to give a presentation on the birds of Bangladesh. It seemed that Bangladesh can count on the goodwill and camaraderie of the unpretentious people of China, especially those committed to the conservation of nature.
