The Science of Birds - From the Field: Birding in China

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Ivan shares his birding experiences and impressions from an amazing 3-week adventure through the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan in China. ~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds website Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 108, is all about my recent, experience birding and traveling through China. If you listened to the last couple episodes, you know that I'm on this big Asian odyssey

through five countries in Asia. Starting with Vietnam, then Cambodia, then China, and then Nepal, which is where I'm recording this episode right now, and then I'm on my way to Bhutan very shortly. And if you're new to the podcast, if you're just starting to listen, and this is one of your first episodes, then I should tell you that this is not my normal format. I have no script that I'm working off of today.

I'm just kind of talking at you based on an outline, recalling my experiences. But normally with the podcast, I have a script, and it's a little more organized and information-rich. But it's been really fun to do these from the field episodes, and I've actually gotten some really nice feedback from my listeners, people saying that they actually enjoy this. So that's great. So this is my third from the field episode on this great Asian Odyssey. When I was in Vietnam and Cambodia, I was actually leading a birding tour. But when I went to China, that was actually what we call a scouting trip. I have an upcoming tour in China in June, and I wanted to come over and check things out and check out

the hotels and restaurants and considered logistics and all that kind of stuff. And of course, familiar with the birds. I was there for three weeks and let me tell you it was spectacular and that's what I'm going to talk about here in this episode. So let's go ahead and get right into it talking about China and its wonderful birds. So we'll first start with a little background information kind of setting the stage. So if you listen to the last episode about Vietnam and Cambodia, you may recall that I talked first about biogeographic realms. We can think of the world as divided into these broadly eight categories, these eight divisions of realms based upon the plants and animals that live within those realms. Each realm has had a long evolutionary history with those

plants and animals interacting over many millions of years. So Southeast Asia is in the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm. But where I was in China, at least in the beginning, was in the Palearctic biogeographic realm. And that realm spans most of Northern Asia and Europe. And I should say that my trip was divided between two different provinces in China. Provinces are sort of the equivalent of states in the U.S. So at first I was in Sichuan, S-I-C-H-U-A-N, and then I traveled south to Yunnan. And both of these are in kind of the southwestern part of China.

Sichuan is firmly within the Palearctic biogeographic realm, whereas Yunnan is kind of the northern end of the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm. So what that means is over the course of my journey, traveled between two biogeographic realms and that means there were some major differences in the plants and animals but of course lots of overlap because nature is kind of fuzzy kind of messy and there's actually a fairly smooth gradient between those two realms so within the Sichuan I started in the city of Changdu C-H-E-N-G-U this lies within a kind of lower elevation basin and it's a pretty

large city and then from there I went up into much higher elevations to the west onto the Tibetan plateau, which is this extremely large, high altitude area that was forced up by the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Eurasian continent, right? So this collision of continents, these tectonic plates collided, and that's what raised up the Himalayan mountain range, and north and behind the Himalayan mountain range, the Tibetan plateau. The ecosystems that I traversed in Sichuan included temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, temperate coniferous forest, and at higher elevations alpine shrublands and grasslands. And some of those grasslands you could call steppe, S-T-E-P-P-E. And by the way, I am recording this in a hotel room

in Nepal. I'm actually in Kathmandu. And so if you hear a little ambient noise, a little background noise, cars and whatnot, maybe people talking. That's because I'm in a very busy city. And despite my best efforts, there's still some background noise. So Sichuan is famous for its cuisine. You may have heard of that. And yes, the food is very, very good. But it's also famous for being the home of the giant panda. The giant panda lives in several provinces in China, but Sichuan is kind of the stronghold of the giant panda. Now, spoiler alert, did I see any giant pandas in the wild? No, that would be incredibly lucky to see a wild giant panda.

Now, I did see real live pandas, and I'll get to that in a few moments. So in Sichuan, in terms of culture, the province is dominated by Han Chinese people, but once you get up on the Tibetan plateau, there are a couple different ethnic minorities. There are Tibetan peoples up there. The area that I traveled through was the home of at least two different Tibetan ethnicities. So you had Han Chinese and these Tibetan peoples and then you had me. Because for almost three weeks, traveling through China, amazingly, I saw basically no other people of European descent, the obvious European descent like myself. I was an outlier.

I was an oddball. and I did not expect that. I've traveled a lot around the world, and this was really the first time I experienced that level of standing out as a foreigner. And people were polite, and nobody, you know, treated me strangely, but I got a lot of strange looks, a lot of stairs, a lot of, you know, people kind of looking over their shoulder at me, and I had to just kind of get used to that.

In one instance, I was birding, and this family, this woman, you know, I couldn't understand what she was saying, she was speaking in Chinese, but she grabbed my arm and pulled me over and included me in her family photo. They were taking pictures by a lake and I was in the picture apparently. So yeah, they were excited to have me in the picture. So along those same lines, very few people I interacted with spoke English or maybe they were just shy and didn't really feel comfortable using English. So that was a challenge. and English is not on the vast majority of the signage. So if you're in a town and you're looking at the names of businesses along the street,

they're all in Chinese, which totally makes sense. I'm in China, that's fine. But again, traveling through many other countries, often there's at least a small addition of English below the native language. But not so much in China. A little bit here and there, but not so much. and from what I experienced, there wasn't really much Western food available, you know, and I'm in these, I was in often kind of smaller towns and villages kind of at the southwestern edge of China. So I'm speaking from that experience, I'm sure that if you go to Beijing or Hong Kong or Shanghai, that there's plenty of people speaking English and English on the signs and English food or Western food, whatever. But this was just really interesting because it really felt like I was traveling. You know what I mean? It's a strange thing to say, but I really felt like I was in a place

that not that many tourists went to, at least not many foreign tourists. Plenty of Chinese tourists visit places that I went, but yeah, it was just really interesting. So anyway, I, in Sichuan, I experienced a broad range of elevations and therefore broad range of climates, because starting in Chengdu, you know, it was relatively low elevation, maybe like, I don't know, thousand feet or something, maybe like 600, 700 meters. But eventually, as I got up onto the Tibetan plateau, at one point we got well over 13,000 feet. We're out walking around birding. And it was really cold, and of course the oxygen is relatively thin, so hiking uphill or walking uphill was a bit of a challenge at times. And when I say we, I was traveling through this part of China

with my friends Wen Yi and Bella and Wansa. So there was me and three young Chinese people. And we had a grand old time. Bella is a professional birding guide, and she's working with me on the upcoming tour in June. Anyway, so there's this broad range of elevations, and I, it was so cold at times, it was like I just wore every layer I possibly had.

I wore it all day, every day, for what felt like a couple weeks. And over the course of this entire trip through China, it felt like, well, actually starting in Cambodia, it was incredibly hot and I was hot and sweaty, you know, the t-shirt and shorts and flip-flops. So that felt like summer. And then I go up to Chengdu, and now it kind of feels like fall, and then I go up on the Tibetan Plateau. Now it's winter. Then I come back down. It's fall again. Then I go to Yunnan and it's like spring. It was all over the place. My body didn't know what to make of it. All right. So let me, let's start talking about birds. So besides all of the cultural interest, China, of course, has all the fascinating history, about 5,000 years of culture.

It has amazing food, lots of things to do from a sort of general travel perspective. But why would you go there to see the birds? What's special about the birds of China? Well, first of all, it's a massive country, right? If you're looking for birds that are unique to a country, well, China has a lot of endemic species because it's just so big. After Russia and Canada, China is basically the third largest country by land area. Being so big, both in terms of latitude and longitude, you get an interesting mix of birds. Now, where I was, because you have these two biogeographic realms, you get a mixture of birds

that have a more northern affinity, so some sort of more Palearctic birds, as well as those from more tropical climates like those from the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm, with lots of overlap, of course. So I just want to highlight a few of the groups of birds that are really kind of interesting and special about this part of the world. First off, we have pheasants, the species in the family phasianity. Perhaps the most famous pheasant in the world is the red jungle fowl, which has been domesticated as the domesticated chicken. But some other species that I saw on my journey in that family were the Chinese grouse, the chestnut-throated monal partridge, the blue-eared pheasant. We tried to find the golden pheasant, but we failed this time. Hopefully next time

when it come back in June, have a better chance. And then there's the Chinese monal, which is this just iridescent rainbow-colored bird. It's ridiculous. I didn't see it this time either. It's way up at high elevation, so hopefully in the summer that'll be a little easier. But pheasants, If you've ever seen, you know, pictures or pheasants in one form or another, many of them are just spectacularly colored, and the males especially have these outlandish plumages with long, beautiful feathers, these ornaments to impress the females. So there are many different pheasant species that you could seek out in China. And then another group that stands out to me are the old world flycatchers. These are species in the family Muscacapadee. This is a species in the family Muscacapadee.

This is one of the biggest bird families in the world. I'm sure I'll do a podcast episode on it at some point. There are about 353 species in this family. These are mostly small, plucky little birds that sort of behave like our New World flycatchers, thus the name, although they're not closely related. And there's many different species to see and to learn about in China. There are the red starts and there are the forktails

and all kinds of cool little guys. usually they have some combination of blue, white, maybe a little rusty color, brown, but they're all over the place and they're great. One of my favorites is the plumbious red start, which is a little slate gray bird with a reddish tail, and it hangs out almost exclusively in rocky streams. So it's jumping around on the rocks in streams and rivers, and that's just really cool. It's a neat habitat. Then the next group we have is the laughing thrushes.

And these are also in Southeast Asia. I mentioned them in the last episode. These are the birds in the family, Leothricotie. I absolutely love laughing thrushes. They are, yes, roughly kind of thrush shaped, but typically with longer bills. And they have just, many of them have really beautiful plumages. Not always really brightly colored so much,

but just beautifully patterned. So even if the colors are more like black, white, brown, gray, They often have these scaly patterns, spots, barring, just really neat patterns. But some do really have some lovely patches of color as well. And the thing about laughing thrushes is they're often skulky and they're also social. So you have these groups of laughing thrushes making a lot of racket, talking to each other chattering, laughing, if you will, moving through the undergrowth. And they're really hard to see despite maybe their colors and patterns and how loud they are. they can be a challenge to actually see.

So that makes them interesting to me. Their behavior and the challenge of finding them, and then when you do find them, bam, you get this beautiful bird, and it's amazing, and there's often quite a few of them all at once. Parrot bills are another group. This is a group that's special to Asia, and they're little guys with kind of big heads and long tails,

and many of the species in the family have little bills that do look vaguely parrot. And the name of the parrot bill family is pretty cool. It's paradox ornithity. Paradoxornitity. It's got the word paradox in there. And then we have the babblers. Now, babblers are tricky because once upon a time, most of them were placed in a family called Timaleidi. Timaleidi was like a kind of a waste bin family, they called it, or like, you know, this trash can family where you're like, well, let's see, we got this bird. It's some kind of old world Asian bird. It's brown. It lives, runs around on the ground. What do we do? I don't know. Who's it related to? I don't know. Just throw it in Timalati.

Just like toss it in the bin. But eventually, eventually ornithologists using genetic data have been able to sort out the birds that all belonged once upon a time to Timalee. And they've split them into multiple families. So Timaleity still exists in a kind of condensed stripped down form, but there are these other families like Pelorneity that also include babblers. So babblers are just kind of usually small to medium-sized birds, kind of with a, I don't know, typical bird shape. And most of them aren't all that colorful. They're kind of spotted or streaky or kind of brown. They're tree babblers. There are ground babblers, scimitar babblers. Cimitar babblers actually have some pretty beautiful plumage, pretty jazzy

looking birds. But anyway, this various babblers across several different families are found throughout China and other parts of Asia. And there are other groups that I would love to talk about. I'm trying to keep this podcast episode from being three hours long, so let me move along here. You know, briefly, I can just mention some of these. There are some really interesting members of the parody family to find, right? Remember I did an episode on that? These are the tits and chickadees and titmice. There are some special species that you can find in Asia. There are the rose finches, the snow finches, the accenters. There are a couple species of dipper that we saw all over the place, the brown and the white-throated, and that was great. There are some really

great nut hatches, and then there are the leaf warblers. And what I'll say about the leaf warblers is there's just these small kind of drab little gray, yellowish green guys, and they are a major ID challenge, at least for me. There are a bunch of them. They look all vaguely similar and they often do make different calls and songs and so if you learn those that's helpful but often you just see this really active little bird flitting around the leaves and you're like oh yeah it's a philosophus warbler that's what i could say that's the genus philoscopus let me go ahead and tell you about my journey through sishuan province and yes now there are dogs barking down on the street in the background so if you hear that don't worry i'm in no danger the dogs cannot

access me i'm safe in my hotel room but yeah it's a little bit annoying right so so i started again in the city of chong du right off the bat having some really amazing sishuan cuisine and then we got out of town we had our little four-wheel drive vehicle and we headed up to higher elevations the first destination for for the first couple days was a place called wahu mountain and we went way up to the top of the mountain for one day and then we spent some time on the slopes for the subsequent days. And right off the bat, we start seeing some really great laughing thrushes and parrot bills and fulvettas and all kinds of cool stuff. So one of the first laughing thrushes that I got a good look at in Sichuan and could hear really well was Elliot's laughing thrush.

Trocolopteron Chrysopterum. And this is a kind of a gray bird overall, but if you look close, it's got some kind of nice, little bit of a subtle scaling pattern on the feathers. But in the wing and tail, there's this beautiful lemon, lime, green, kind of iridescent color.

It's really nice. Nevertheless, it's sort of a subtle, beauty. But it turned out that Elliot's laughing thrush is a very common species. We saw it almost all the way through China, not quite in southernmost, westernmost, Yunnan, but everywhere else almost. These birds do fairly well in disturbed habitats around the margins of human communities. So one of my traveling companions was Wansa, and Wansa is from Sichuan, and he was trying to teach Bella and Wen Yi how to say the name of Elliot's Laughing Thrush in Chinese, in the local sort of dialect. And they were just speaking in Chinese in the car, and he kept saying it, and I was like listening.

And I eventually kind of understood what he was saying. And so I started saying it, which it kind of became funny to them. So it's something like, zun tzu ta'o me. And that's Elliot's a laughing thrush. Anyway, so it became kind of this running joke for the rest of the time that every time we'd see the bird we'd say the name in Chinese

or we would just replace the bird's name for anything exciting. We'd say, oh, what did you see over there? Oh, Sun Tzu Zsao-Mei, and you know, something like that. But here's Wansa saying it properly because he's the real deal. Adiard's laughing thrush. So anyway, we're up on Wawu Mountain

and we're birding and we're seeing other cool species like the great parrot bill which is the largest member of the parrot bill family and there's we're walking around um there's this big boardwalk on the top of wawoo mountain and there's snow and it's pine trees a very kind of chilly day in this boreal type environment and there's lots of bamboo there's different species of bamboo all over the place all across this journey and i got to tell you every time i see bamboo i just get so excited because that's someone from North America, to me seeing bamboo just signifies Asia. It reminds me that I'm not at home.

Whereas pine trees, you know, I got pine trees. I mean, even though these are of course different pine tree species, there's nothing that says Asia to me more than bamboo in terms of wild plants. So on Wahoo Mountain, one of the things that happened was we saw wild red pandas. I tried not to get my hopes up, but sure enough, there they were and they were amazing. They were adorable I got a couple decent photos it was totally amazing you know an animal like that I've seen in the zoo I've seen it in movies documentaries you never really think you're going to see one in the wild and then there it is so no I didn't see a giant panda but I did see red pandas and that was deeply satisfying and really really cool so on the slopes of wawoo mountain when we were burning down

there it was kind of foggy and misty and we're in the this mixed evergreen deciduous forest. So there are some trees that have turned yellow and orange and red. So there's some nice fall color. But still lots of evergreen broadleave trees mixed in with a few conifers. Lots of moss, lichen. And we're outburning. And I'm just looking at this landscape and these steep slopes covered with this kind of forest.

And there's a river. And it was just one of the most beautiful places I'd ever seen. It was so ethereal and beautiful. and again just kind of evocative of this idea of Asia, you know, with the bamboo in the foreground and these beautiful trees, these sculpted trees in the background. I can't do it justice with words, but man, it was just, it was just really deeply moving. It was beautiful. So eventually we got up into the much higher elevations, and rather than there being all these

steep slopes and peaks around, we got onto this relatively flat plain, the Tibetan plateau. And at that point, we're driving around on these fairly straight roads across this flat landscape, but we're at like 9, 10, 11,000 feet at this point, way, way up there. The highest peak in the state of Oregon where I live in the U.S. is only a little over 11,000 feet. But for like a week, we were over that elevation in China, just walking around, doing all of our business. So I kept having to remind myself that of how high we were.

It was amazing. And yes, it was really cold. You know, this is December, and we're at, you know, 10, 11,000 feet in the northern latitudes, and it was really cold. There were some mornings where we were out birding at minus 15 degrees Celsius, which is, I think, about 9 degrees or 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And, yeah, I did surprisingly well for those low temperatures, but I was always thankful to get back in the car and crank the heater. So on the plateau, the birding was different. You had a lot of kind of open country birds, a lot of grassland birds, raptors soaring overhead.

We had some great vultures. I finally got to see bearded vulture or the Lamergeier. I've been wanting to see that species for a long time. It's an amazing bird. I'll probably do an entire podcast episode on it at some point. I didn't get to see them very close, but definitely saw them flying overhead and on some rocky outcrops. we saw large flocks of rose finches and other songbirds. In this part of China, in winter, you get these big flocks of Grandala.

That's the name of a species, Grandala, Cila color. This is a relatively small member of the Thrush family, and the males are this just rich, beautiful cobalt blue color with black wings. So they're kind of like the old world answer to the bluebirds of North America. So there was this day where we saw big flocks of Grandala and, you know, their blue was catching the light. And yet it was snowing. The snowflakes were coming down. So he had snow with these bluebirds. And then they actually had little tiny crystals of ice on their face. And at first we thought they had like spots or they were molting or something. But we realized, no, that's snow. Those are little ice crystals on the birds. So that was very special because in the summer, you would typically expect to see just a male and female, maybe just a pair of front dollop. But instead, we saw hundreds of them all at once. So that was a special thing to experience only in winter. Now, the bird that I was probably maybe most excited to see on the Tibetan plateau, and this is funny, was the ground tit. Pseudocis humulus. Just this little brown, gray,

scrappy bird, not colorful at all, not all that jazzy looking. But this thing, you may recall when I did the episode on the family parody, on the family of the tits, titmice, and chickadees, that I talked about this bird. And I'm pretty sure that it was the weirdo, that it got a weirdo alert. Because this species is so unlike the other members of the family parody,

it was, for a long time, it was considered a member of the corvety of the family of jays and crows. Ornithologists used to think it was a small ground jay. But once again, genetics comes in, and we use that data. to reclassify the bird, and the scientists realized that it is, in fact, a perid. So I got to see these things for the first time in the flesh.

These little ground tits are bouncing around like ping pong balls on the open country. They're running around right next to PICA. There are these cute little mammals, PICA, that are just hanging out when they're burrows, and the ground tits are right next to them. And I was just so happy to see them. Another really satisfying experience was finding the blue-eared pheasant. So we went out specifically looking for that species one day in the boreal forest or the subalpine forest with lots of furs, pines, hemlocks.

And we're looking and we're looking and we're in the right habitat and it's the right time of day and all this stuff. And we actually heard some at one point and so we're like clamoring up this hill and it's like, you know, we're at 10,000 feet huffing and puffing and then nothing. And it's very cold. The sun is setting, so we have to head out, we got to get going, we're on this kind of rough road with lots of ice, and there was a lot of ice on the road on this journey. And so we give up. We just say, ah, we give up. No blue-eared pheasant today, not on this trip. Oh, well, boo-hoo. So we're driving away, and you know what's going to happen. We come around a corner, and sure enough, there they are. We all freak out. We get out of the car. We start snapping photos, and actually we got a recording. So here's a recording of the blue-eared pheasant.

The blue-eared pheasant is an overall gray bird, and the male has some really beautiful tail feathers. He's got some upper-tail coverts that are kind of long and hair-like, almost like peacock feathers, and then his tail feathers are white with black tips. And his face, he has lots of bare red skin around his face and these cool little white ear tufts. And I have to remind myself that this is, this is not the blue-eared pheasant, it's the blue-eared pheasant. Because it doesn't have blue ears, but it is an eared pheasant, but it is a blue-eared pheasant, if you get what I'm saying. It all depends on where you put that little hyphen. Anyway, super great bird.

I mean, any pheasant is exciting to see, but man, it was just, it was a great way to finish a day of birding on the Tibetan Plateau. Our last major birding area in Sichuan was a really wonderful national park called Tanjiahe, Tanjiahe, something like that. I want to say at Tanjia He, but I think it's Tanjia He. This was a place that was back down at slightly lower elevations, maybe more like, you know, between six and nine thousand feet and some really beautiful lush forest again and because this place is protected there are lots of not just birds but also interesting mammals to see it too is a stronghold

of the giant panda of course which we did not see but it's there nice to know but we saw some really great birds in there some new birds for me were things like gray-headed woodpecker Crested Kingfisher, Slady Bunting, tawny fish owl, bar-tailed tree creeper, and Sichuan tree creeper. The river in this park was really beautiful and it had just these massive boulders, just fantastically enormous and beautiful emerald green water. And one of the things that was exciting to me as someone who's interested in herpetology was that those waters are home to the Chinese giant salamander. which is the largest amphibian species in the world alongside the Japanese giant salamander. Now, of course, we didn't see any, but it was really nice to imagine them being down in the river that we were so close to. These amphibians get to, I think, you know, at their biggest, something like five feet long, which is pretty crazy.

So not only did we see many great bird species in Tangiahue National Park, we also saw some really cool mammals, and I will probably talk about the mammals towards the end of the episode. So I was in Sichuan province for probably, I think it was about 12 or 13 days. And it was really a spectacular journey. It was cold most of the time. And honestly, that made it kind of feel more adventurous and more just really interesting. It felt like we were pretty, you know, pretty cool intrepid explorers out there in this frigid wonderland. But then it was time to get on a plane and take a short flight to Yunnan to the south.

We had about 10 days in Yunnan, and we were joined by a couple more people, and unfortunately we had to say goodbye to Wanza, so our group was now five people, a little bit different mix, all really great people with good attitudes. We had such a wonderful time. And yeah, we explored Yunnan. We went to a variety of different ecosystems again. We started at relatively high elevations, nothing like the Tibetan Plateau, but still the mornings were cold and chilly and a little frost cover. but the sun was shining and usually by the afternoons we could shed a layer or two and then as we headed south and west we got to lower elevations and lower latitudes so things warmed up so right out the gate we got to see one of the coolest birds of my trip which was the giant nut hatch sita magna This is an endangered species that you'll find only in southwestern China, basically just in Yunnan province and in the sort of eastern part of Myanmar and maybe a little bit in Thailand. So yeah, we saw several individuals of this species in a pine forest.

It looks like your typical nut hatch in terms of its shape and behavior. It's kind of a slaty gray on the back with a darker kind of eye stripe, a little bit of chestnut on the belly and vent with some nice white spotting. And it's about twice the size of your typical nut hatch. So it really is a giant nut hatch. So we continued on through Yunnan through these different areas. And I should point out that Yunnan has a great number of ethnic minorities. So again, Han Chinese being the dominant ethnicity in China,

but there were people like the De Lisu, the Bai, the Dai in Yunnan, which means we got to see some different architecture and experience different foods and see different types of people. It was very interesting. So in the mountains of Yunnan, we did typical birding. We were walking around the field, looking, listening, just like one does, but eventually we transitioned to doing at least some birding from hides, right, or blinds. This is where a person or a family has set up a sort of feeding station for birds,

where the observers are hidden behind a screen, and the birds have been habituated to some extent. They know that food is available at this spot, so they come in whenever the hide owner whistles or calls them in. And so this is an interesting way to, quote, unquote, go birding because you are sitting there and the birds are coming to you. So it's easier than some might say it's cheating, but you do get amazing views of birds that you might not ever get otherwise. So we got to see lots of cool birds this way. Some of these really skulky birds like laughing thrushes that normally would just be hiding in the bushes. These kind of come hopping out, grab a few mealworms, then they go back into the bushes. but you get a good look.

So we continued to do more traditional birding as well, and I kind of pushed for that, but we also did a fair amount of hide birding. And we were often shoulder to shoulder with lots of Chinese photographers, bird photographers that were in these hides. So it's an interesting phenomenon. I think that it might be worth making an entire podcast episode

talking about bird hides and blinds and photography. Because you may remember in the last episode I talked about the issue in Vietnam and in parts of Southeast Asia where hides are places that poachers target to capture wild birds and sell them. Now, as far as I know, that's not as much of a problem in China, so it felt a little better to do that. But anyway, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. So, again, I think a podcast episode might be in order. But anyway, in the end, we got to see lots of great birds that way. And, you know, both in the field and the hides, I saw.

over 13 species of laughing thrushes, which was really cool, because again, this is one of my favorite groups. Some standout species were the spotted laughing thrush, which again is not overly colorful, but just has beautiful patterns. And then the red-tailed laughing thrush, which does have some really nice color. The red-tailed laughing thrush is kind of gray overall, but it has a orangish crown, white cheeks, really red wings and tail and some black mixed in there. and it's just a really nice bird, and there were lots of them at the hides. They're very active, very cheeky birds,

if I really like them. A moment ago, I mentioned that we saw the giant nut hatch. Well, we also saw a couple of the largest representatives of some other bird families. We got to see the great slaty woodpecker. That was really cool. This is the world's largest woodpecker species. And we saw it right at the end of the day

as we were almost to our lodge, and this was right on the border between China and Myanmar. So I could look across this fence and see the hills of Myanmar, which is really cool. And I actually got a recording of the Great Slady Woodpecker as it came in and perched on a tree. So here we go. So that was the Great Slady Woodpecker. That was really cool.

The largest woodpecker in the world. And then a little later in the trip, we got to see another species that I really wanted to see, and that is the sultan tit. The sultan tit is the largest member of the family parody. And it's maybe not quite twice the size of your typical chickadee, but it is a lot bigger. It's mostly black with a beautiful crown, with a kind of crest. Just a really cool bird. So yeah, those are just some cool highlight species being the biggest members of their family. Another standout moment was when we found a bird that is almost exclusively found in China,

also a little bit in Myanmar, and that was the eye-ringed parrot bill. This just cute little tiny bird, if you're familiar with bush tits in North America, they're similar to that. This little stubby bill, round head and body, long tail, cute little face, and they hang out in groups. And we were trying and trying in these kind of agricultural fields and scrubby areas with no luck. And once again, right when we gave up, we're about to get back in the car, I'm like, hey, what's that? There's a flock of little birds over there. And Bella's like, oh my God, that's them. That's the birds. I ring parrot bill. So now we're running and we get to get to watch

these little birds. They were actually quite confiding. They were feeding in this tall grass, and they really didn't care about us standing pretty close to them. And there were, I don't know, I think we counted or we estimated something like 80 of them in this flock. And here's the sound of these little guys as they're feeding in the grass. So that was the I-ringed parrot bill. And forgive me, I feel like I'm kind of jumping all over the place with telling you about this journey. This is the problem with working just from a rough outline, but hey, it's what we got.

So I just want to tell you about one last bird in Yunnan, and then I want to share some general thoughts. And that bird is the spotted elitura, but I think that's how you pronounce it. I want to say Elocura. It's E-L-A-C-H-U-R-A, but I think it's Eletura. The scientific name is Eletura Formosa. This is a small, ren-like bird. It's very spotted overall, kind of brown with little white spots. The wings and tail are kind of a chestnut color with some nice black barring. If you know what a Eurasian Wren or a Winter Wren or Pacific Wren looks like, it looks a lot like that. But it's not a wren at all. In fact, this bird has been difficult to classify, but relatively recently ornithologists placed it in its own family, elechurity.

So the family eliturity is monotypic. It has one species, and that is this spotted elitura. And boy, we saw that little bugger. We saw it in kind of a slightly lower elevation, almost tropical rainforest environment in Yunnan. It was one of the last exciting birds that we got to see on the trip in China. It's a very skulky bird.

It was just calling and just hopping around in the undergrowth in this very kind of mossy, damp area by a stream. But eventually, patients paid off, and we got to see it, and we actually got to see multiple individuals throughout the day. And anytime I see a bird that is the only representative species of a family, that it to me is very exciting. It means I got to see a new bird family. And there are only about 250 bird families in the world. So if you get to see a new family, that's pretty exciting, at least I think.

So over about three weeks in China, I ended up seeing 361 species. And of those, 248 were lifers, meaning species that I had never seen anywhere before. So that's pretty remarkable. I mean, we were basically birding all day, every day, unless we were traveling between locations. And even then, we're still keeping an eye out for birds, of course. So that was really successful on the birding front. It was also successful on the scouting front. I feel really good about leading the tour coming up in June.

I'm excited to return to Sichuan, China. The tour is just going to be in Sichuan, but also with an extension that actually goes up north to see the terracotta warriors of Xi'an, which is a spectacular world-famous archaeological site. And then the extension continues on to Beijing to see the Forbidden City and the Green wall of China. So I can't wait for all of that. That's in June. So just some general thoughts about

the journey through China. I had a spectacular time. It was the trip of a lifetime in terms of that on top of these other Asian countries I'm visiting. I just felt like, wow, this is really epic. It kind of really sunk in once I was in China. As I said, I felt it was very obvious that I was a foreigner, so I felt kind of out of place at times. But I never felt. unsafe or really unwelcomed. I felt very at peace and at ease. Of course, I was very thankful to have my friends there that were Chinese that could help me navigate various situations. But yeah, it was just spectacular. And I had amazing food along the way. Every meal was delicious. And it was very just kind of traditional Chinese communal. I never knew what was coming to the table. Just a bunch of plates

of shared food would come and we would just, you know, shovel it onto our bowls or our plates, and the flavors were amazing. One of my favorites was Mopu tofu, M-O-P-U. I'm probably not pronouncing that right, Maupu, Mopu. And I had that right in the beginning in Chengdu and Sishuan. And this thing has lots of Sishuan peppers. And if you've never had Sishuan pepper, which I guess I had never had, this was my first experience. It not only has a great flavor, but it also has this kind of numbing, tingling effect on your mouth and tongue. And I really enjoyed that. And it also brings out the flavors of other spices. So that was super fun. And I always enjoyed having mopu tofu or any dish with Sishuan peppers. And you may recall that I'm vegetarian. So everything I was eating was

vegetarian, but it was all so good and it tasted so fresh and just really good. And especially in the cold environments, all that hot food was really welcomed. And I had hot tea and coffee, but you know, interestingly, coffee is not so much part of the culture there. So it was mostly me and my friends kind of having to provide coffee on our own. We would just find some hot water and add some instant coffee and there you go. Another general observation, this one about birds, is that it really is a lot, or at least when it comes to forest birding, a lot of it has to do with mixed species flocks. That is where the action is. Yeah, of course you're going to get, you know, a bird here and there and that's all fine, but it can be quite quiet for a long period of time

until a mixed species flock comes through. And then it's just like pandemonium. And now there's suddenly there's too many birds. You don't know which way to look. And you're just like, ah. But for example, in Tangiahue National Park, here's an example of a mixed flock that we saw. Here are some species that were in that flock.

Rufus-faced warbler, black-throated tit, yellow-browed tit, green-backed tit, some tree-creeper species, maybe one or two different species. gray-capped pygmy woodpecker, Eurasian nut hatch, and streak-breasted scimitar babbler. And dozens of those guys are all hopping around in the same trees and bushes. It was really exciting. So with this kind of phenomenon, it's kind of boom and bust, right?

And I mentioned that, I think, for Vietnam and Cambodia, we also experienced that there. So you have to be patient, but then the patience pays off when a big flock comes through. And I said I would mention the mammals. So this trip turned out to be pretty spectacular for mammal observations as well. You know, the red panda, that's probably the most exciting thing. But a close second to the pandas, the red pandas, was seeing wild wolves on the Tibetan plateau. On this really cold day, there were these two wolves that were just walking across the grassland, and we got our scope on them, and they were looking at us, and we were looking at them,

and it was really cool. There were also lots of Tibetan foxes on the plateau, and these are very kind of strange-looking foxes with big heads and stuff. squint eyes and short legs. As I mentioned, lots of pica, so those cute little relatives of rabbits that were digging burrows, there were just like countless pikas across the plateau. Lots of yaks, which are, of course, a domesticated animal in the Bovody family, but I was really excited to see yaks because I've heard about it my whole life and never seen any yaks, and they were everywhere. And another member of the family Bovadi is the Taken, or Taken, T-A-K-I-N. We saw those in

Tangiaha National Park. This is, they're kind of a goat-like animal or almost like a musk ox, although they're not that closely related to musk ox, really neat, weird, but also kind of beautiful and cute-looking mammals. We saw some, we got some really nice looks of them in Tangiaha National Park, and that's one of the famous animals there. We also made a special visit to see the golden snub-nosed monkeys. These are gorgeous monkeys with kind of a golden brown fur color.

These pale, bluish-white faces with basically no nose, almost like a skull-like nose. They're kind of, they can almost be creepy looking, but they're also really cute and really beautiful. And we went to a site where there are these, there are dozens of them that are habituated to people, kind of like the hides where they come down to get fed. But yeah, I was within almost arm's reach of some of these golden snub-nosed monkeys at this one site. And it was amazing to see them so close. They're so beautiful. And again, this is another species that I was aware of for a long time

and I would really want it to see in the wild. Fun fact about that monkey is that other than humans, this is the primate that can tolerate the lowest temperatures in the world. So humans are pretty cold tolerant, and this is the second most cold tolerant primate. And yes, we saw lots of squirrels here and there. We did eventually see some giant squirrels. So squirrels are cool and all, but, you know, it's hard to get excited

about every squirrel until we saw giant squirrels. Now we're talking. These things, you think you're seeing an ape jumping through the trees and you realize, no, that's a squirrel. Whoa, that thing is enormous. That thing could take your face off. But anyway, it was cool. And there were other mammals. There were, you know, different kinds of ungulates and things. And just, yeah, it was pretty cool from that perspective as well. We didn't really see any reptiles or amphibians. It is winter after all in the Northern Hemisphere. So we didn't see so much of that kind of. of life. A few interesting insects, lots of great plants, fantastic landscapes, gorgeous landscapes. Yeah, it was incredible. My time in China was just really memorable and wonderful and I can't wait

to go back. And speaking of that, as I mentioned, I have this tour in June. The tour is 15 days starting on June 7th and then there's that six-day extension going up to see the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall and all that. There are a few spaces left, so if you're interested in joining me in China next June, then you should get in touch with me, Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. There may be three or four spaces left, so don't hesitate if this all sounds really good to you. Now, I should point out that the tour only goes to Sichuan province, not Yunnan, but it is totally spectacular, and again, we've got that extension,

which everybody right now that's signed up for the tour is doing the extension, because, you know, if you're going to go all the way to China, you might as well see the terracotta warriors and the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and Beijing and all that stuff too. And I can't wait to see those areas in June because, you know, I got to see them kind of at the coldest time of year. And so to go back to those parks and mountains and the plateau to see it green and flowering and the leaves opening up.

Oh, it's going to be absolutely beautiful, I'm sure. So, yeah, that's it for China. I am heading off to Bhutan, but before I go, I wanted to. do something that I'm uh I need to catch up on and that is thanking my wonderful patrons the people who have recently signed up to become supporters of the science of bird podcast so I'm a little bit behind so I want to give a shout out to Nikki lifts stuff Dana Cox Maria Carolina Cintra Harry Sabatini Jesse Whitkind Bob Nussbaum Scott Fife Derek Jefferson Riley Wolf William Higgins, Mike Rigny, Pat Wells, Richard, Joanne Tillman's, Elizabeth Sullivan Burton, S.W., Jill Fairchild, Heather, Merv and Moe, and Bruce Thomas.

All of you signed up within the last couple months, and so thank you all so much for supporting the podcast. You are awesome. All right, guys, I got to go. I will talk to you next time. Thank you so much for listening. Cheers. You know,