Theme: Summer Solstice when the cuckoo cries - "Birdsong Season" reading sharing session
Time: June 4, 2021, 19:00-21:00
Location: Sinan Bookstore
Guest: Wang Ximin, Director of Science Popularization Department of Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden
Organizer: Yilin Publishing House
China's bird watching, in the ascendant for 20 years
Moderator: Welcome to tonight's "Summer Solstice when the Cuckoo Cries - "Birdsong Season" Reading sharing session". Birds may seem inconspicuous, but they always evoke deep emotional resonance in humans. We heard the footsteps of summer approaching in the cuckoo's cry, and we saw nostalgia in the silhouette of the swallow. Recent news of the migration of wild elephants in Yunnan has attracted much attention, which has led us to think about how humans and wild animals can live in harmony. With some thoughts, we asked the guest, Mr. Wang Ximin, and the editor-in-charge Mr. Yang to share the story behind the book for us.
Yang Yating: I am the editor-in-charge of the book "Birdsong Season". In 2016, I curated the nature science book series "Skyline", which selects some seemingly ordinary things in our lives and derives the rich history behind it, telling the relationship between humans and nature. Up to now, a total of 8 books have been published in the "Skyline" series, including "The Handbook of Cloud Collectors", "The Talent of Birds", "The Code of Water" and "Looking into the Depths of the Starry Sky", which help everyone understand the other side of the world from multiple perspectives such as astronomy, meteorology and biology.
"Birdsong Season" is the latest work of "Skyline", it is a bird science book written by two British naturalists, and it is also a natural literature. There are 247 species of birds in the book, 200 of which are also distributed in China, especially in the northwest region. The translators of this book are Dr. Zhu Lei and Wang Qi and Wang Hui, who are ornithologists and ecological conservation workers. I also asked Dr. Ma Jingneng, a British biologist and author of the Handbook of Chinese Birds in the Wild, to write the preface to the book, and Professor Liu Yang of the School of Ecology of Sun Yat-sen University also wrote a recommendation. Therefore, "Birdsong Season" can be said to be a book made by a group of nature lovers.
Today, I have the honor to invite Mr. Wang Ximin, director of the Science Popularization Department of Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden, to share the content of this book with us, who is a leading figure in the field of natural education in China.
Ximin Wang: I especially want to know why people are interested in this book?
Participant: I am a bird watching enthusiast, and what attracted me to this book is that it is a "home bird watching guide", which I think is quite interesting, and I also want to know some of the experience of foreign naturalists in bird watching. Bird watching has only emerged in China in the past one or two decades, and it has risen earlier and more mature in European and American countries.
Wang Ximin: I work at the Chenshan Botanical Garden in Shanghai, started bird watching around 2000, and now for 21 years, I was one of the earliest people in China to be exposed to bird watching.
At that time, it was very interesting for us to go out for bird watching, and most people who saw us would ask, are you here to measure? They will feel that this place is not going to be developed, whether you are going to build a house. When we see the birds, we will be very excited to share with the onlookers, and some passers-by will come to see it with great interest: "That duck is good, about 5 pounds." "That's basically the reaction twenty years ago.
Another particularly interesting reaction may not be the case now. At that time, Chinese didn't do much bird watching, and we were not able to meet Chinese when we watched birds, and occasionally we would encounter some foreigners. Foreigners see us bird watching and ask, "Are you Japanese?" Knowing that we were Chinese, the foreigners were very happy and said, "Great, the Chinese birds are protected."
Indeed, in the process of bird watching, in addition to enjoying the beauty brought to us by these birds, we can also find many problems encountered by birds. Bird watching is particularly easy to arouse our feelings for nature, so that we can act as much as possible to protect it and love it.
Nunoya Fuya, Wari barley Wariya
Wang Ximin: I myself have embarked on a very interesting life path because of bird watching. Just now the host talked about the wild elephants in Yunnan, and now they are divided into two batches, one to Kunming and one to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I once worked at the Banna Botanical Garden for eight years and have very good memories.
Why did I go to Xishuangbanna to work? I was originally a lover of literature and at the same time a lover of wildlife, especially birds. I was bird watching twenty years ago, and when I discovered the problems faced by Chinese birds during bird watching, I wanted to do something. At that time, I was very young, and I felt that I would do something immediately to do - a lot of people caught birds, and I arrested these people. So I went as a policeman.
I'm from Zhejiang, working as a policeman in Zhejiang, and I really arrested some of these people. But in the process of catching, we found a problem, those who catch birds and sell birds in the wild, they actually live at the bottom. I once caught two people in a market, and a brown-headed crow sold for 5 yuan, which was very cheap. They said they were from Sichuan, came to Zhejiang to work, did not find a suitable job, and then went to catch birds to sell, hoping to earn some travel expenses to go home. I said these birds can't actually sell for any money, so I might as well just let it go, you want to go home, I can subsidize you a little.
These things touched me a lot. Later I kept thinking, why would some people do such a thing? Can we do something to make this behavior less? Later, due to a good opportunity, I went to the United States to study environmental education, and my main job was to take children to play outdoors, learn about animals and plants, play kayaking, and things like that.
At that time, the United States published a book called "The Last Child in the Woods", which said that children did not go to the woods to play for various reasons. When I look at it, isn't "The Last Child in the Woods" our Chinese children? I think American children are actually quite happy, their forests are good, there are many activities, and the teachers are very professional. And our Chinese children, including myself, have not been told by any teacher since I was a child what this bird is called, what this tree is called. I think this is very interesting. Later, after returning from studying in the United States, I went to the Banna Botanical Garden to do this work, telling the children that nature is a very interesting thing, and bird watching is also a very interesting thing.
For example, cuckoos, have you really heard this bird call in the wild? I suggest you pay attention to it, it is appearing in Shanghai during this time. Its scientific name is the Great Cuckoo, and its voice is "Cuckoo, Cuckoo". In fact, Shanghai is more of a four-voice cuckoo, which is not the same as this cuckoo. Regarding the four cuckoo cries, people in different places have different descriptions, one saying that "single sticks are bitter", and another saying that it is "cutting wheat and cutting grain". In fact, the sound is the same, different people have different states of mind, there will be different languages to describe it. There is also a kind of noise crane, which can now be heard in Century Park and Tatsuyama Botanical Garden. The chirping of these birds heralds the arrival of spring and is a particularly typical phenomenon.
The book "Birdsong" is British, so they attach great importance to the big cuckoo. There used to be an interesting project in Europe called "The Messenger of Spring". It selects several particularly typical migratory birds in Europe, which migrate from south to north in the spring, passing through various European countries in turn. They make records, for example, today you see it in France, tomorrow you see it in Germany, the day after tomorrow you see it in England. Then they have a website where you upload your records to the site and you can see that over time, the birds are migrating north step by step, which is particularly interesting. Among the birds it selected was the great cuckoo. If one day you hear this sound in the wild, you don't try to find it, it is particularly hidden, hidden in the highest place of a tree, you can only hear the sound. Its appearance is actually very inconspicuous, and there is no bright color, but its sound is so attractive.
The science and history behind a bird
Wang Ximin: Speaking of cuckoo, it also has special significance in Chinese culture. Do the children know the story of the cuckoo? One of our famous poetic images is related to the cuckoo – "the cuckoo cries blood". The ancients thought that the cuckoo screamed so miserably that it would call for blood. "Wangdi Chunxin to cuckoo", said cuckoo is the soul of a deceased emperor. In fact, bird watching is closely related to our history, culture, ecology, and our personal mood. So if you're not a birdwatcher yet, I highly recommend you to try it, it's a very interesting hobby.
In recent years, bird watching has been well promoted in China. More than ten years ago, we were bird watching, and there were very few people we met, and everyone didn't understand. At that time, one of the most famous bird watching guides in China was called "Field Manual of Chinese Birds", and its author was called Ma Jingneng. Don't think that his real surname is Ma, he is a foreigner. At that time, as a layman, I couldn't understand why the Chinese Bird Manual was written by a foreigner. Why is there more than 1,000 kinds of birds in China, and the result is that foreigners draw all the birds, write out the distribution of all the birds in China, and describe the characteristics of each bird? With 1.4 billion people in China, why is no one doing it? After bird watching, I found that there were indeed too few people who cared, and our history of bird watching was too short.
I was also shocked when the book "Birdsong Season" came out. I myself have 20 years of bird watching history, and I am a person trained by the Chinese department of the university, and my self-vision is quite high, but this book deeply impressed me. I can't write this book, but there are two things I think are particularly good about it. First, you look at the bird, but it's not just telling you what the bird looks like, it's really about the whole history of the bird in England—what it was in hundreds of years ago, what it is now, how people used to misunderstand it, how Aristotle thought of it, how Keats viewed it. A bird has a lot of stories in it, so the author of this book is very remarkable. They can combine history, culture, art, and science into a bird's introduction.
And such data, realistically speaking, we in China do not have. Can you tell me what has changed in China's sparrows? I'm sure most people can't say it, because we don't even know what data the sparrows had 20 years ago. Can you tell us about the distribution of the great cuckoo in China? No. 20 years ago, no one cared about the number, breeding ground, and wintering ground of the big cuckoo in China, and we really didn't accumulate this data.
The second highlight of "Birdsong Season" is its literary nature. Just now I said four cuckoos "single sticks are so bitter" and "cut wheat and cut grain", and everyone thought it was very interesting. But beyond that, I can't think of any more words to describe its call. If you can only use this harmonic tone to describe a kind of bird song, don't you feel very poor? And this book is remarkable, it uses very rich language, very vivid vocabulary to describe a kind of bird song. Authors are not only ornithologists, they are really very senior writers, with deep literary skills and a very strong grasp of words. Our translator was also very good at translating it.
So far, I don't think any book in China can surpass it. We can write about the personal feelings of a bird, but it is difficult to talk about the bird in a hundred-year-old dimension, and it is difficult to describe the call of a bird in very many words. This is also related to the creation of Chinese natural literature. When I was a graduate student in China, I majored in children's literature, specializing in stories written for children, and I loved to read picture books. At that time, we Chinese picture books, and the names of animals and plants involved were basically written blindly and scribbled, and everyone did not understand, so they casually wrote the name of a tree or a bird. If you look at European or American picture books, you will find that the bird you paint is the kind of bird that really exists.
We have made great progress in the past few years, but 20 years ago this area was extremely poor and lacking. I think this change should come sooner. So I often say, I don't put my hopes in the children, I hope in ourselves, I hope that the adults here, the people who are willing to spend this evening listening to me share, we come to do something to give the children a better understanding of our world.
The most common local bird is often the mascot of European and American schools
Wang Ximin: I would like to ask our children, do you know what the most common bird called around us is? Sparrows, magpies, and pigeons? Pigeon is not the official name of a bird. The most common thing in Shanghai is the bead-necked dove, which has a circle of small dots on its neck, like pearls. This is also one of the places where I feel we are lacking. In fact, we have many birds in China, more than 1,000 species, ranking first in the world. There are actually many birds around us, such as bead-necked doves and squids are very common, and sparrows are also more common. There is also a bird in Shanghai called the bald eagle, and it will definitely be parked on the camphor tree in your neighborhood. But most of us don't know each other, and we kids don't have the opportunity to get to know each other, which I think is a pity because we lack the culture of bird watching.
There is a bird that almost all European children know, called the Eurasian Plover. It has been fully integrated into British life and culture, appearing on various occasions, including various logos, advertisements and even Christmas cards. How popular has it become? Many advertisers who are popular in China use its images when they need to find bird materials. Because our advertiser didn't understand, he thought this bird was very beautiful, so he put it in Chinese advertising. We know that at a glance at the bird, we know that this is definitely not Chinese, it is copied. When you have a chance to encounter it in the future, you will know that this bird is called eurasian plover, and it has a very famous name, called "Robin".
Many schools in the United States will choose the most common local bird as a mascot, and children know from an early age that this bird is around us, such as the most common main cardinal in the United States. Few schools in China choose an animal or plant as a mascot, so that students can understand it and recognize it from an early age. I think this is also where our education is flawed.
Is the word "owl" recognized? owl. This bird is called the barn owl, and after I liked bird watching, I was very impressed with our ancients, and our ancients coined these words to describe this bird. Our current ornithologists are also remarkable, they have a very good foundation in ancient writing, combining ornithology from the West with the knowledge of birds by the ancient Chinese. Barn owl is very common in European and American culture, the barn is a barn, this kind of barn owl likes to live in the barn, because there are rats in the barn. Rats want to eat the grain in the barn, and the owl hides in the barn to eat the mouse, so it is named the barn owl.
A few years ago, there was a very famous cartoon in the United States, "Owl Kingdom: Legend of the Guardians", the protagonist was the Barn Owl. All the owls in this animation are real in North America, which I think is particularly remarkable, these animators have studied birds so deeply, and these are the roles that play in the subtlety.
Why am I talking about this barn owl today? Because I have an indissoluble relationship with it. The distribution range of the barn owl in China is very small, and there is currently only one very stable breeding population in Xishuangbanna, which is what I found. I found it interesting and a small breakthrough for myself. I was walking in the botanical garden one day and suddenly heard a cry from the sky, I don't know what it is. There are about thirty species of owls in China, and the most likely ones I've heard in botanical gardens are barn owl and grass owl. The grass owl is more similar to the barn owl, but the grass owl's body is yellow, and the barn owl is white.
Later, we found that our botanical garden had a pair of barn owl, and then found that it had a breeding nest. Then it was found that these barn owl breed in January, strange, generally spring is the season for birds to breed, why do barn owl breed in January? Xishuangbanna is relatively hot, the temperature is very suitable, and theoretically, it is suitable for breeding all year round. But it doesn't breed in the spring, why? In fact, the book also mentions that because Xishuangbanna is a tropical region, it enters the rainy season after entering the spring, and the rainy season is very difficult for the barn owl with so many feathers to fly, and once it is wet, it cannot fly. It also has a bunch of small babies to raise, once it can't fly, how to raise children? So the barn owl is very clever, and it chooses to breed in the dry season of Xishuangbanna, that is, winter, so that it has enough energy to catch mice and feed its children.
A four-man bird watching group in a German concentration camp
Wang Ximin: Has anyone ever seen a gray crane? In Shanghai's Nanhui Wetland and Dongtan Wetland, it can be seen in winter. It is a crane that is widely distributed in China. There are 15 species of cranes in the world and 9 species in China. The crane is a red-crowned crane that no longer flies south around Yancheng. Have you ever seen a crane in the wild? If not, I think I should look for a chance to meet. Because it's so big, it's not hard to see, it's easier to see. The first and most famous place in China where cranes are easier to see is Poyang Lake in Jiangxi, where you can see several at once. The second is Dongting Lake, where there are white-headed cranes and grey cranes. There is also a black-necked crane, which is a highland crane that breeds on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and overwinters in Yunnan and Guizhou, and is very much in protected areas.
Why do you want to introduce this bird to everyone? First, the crane is really beautiful and beautiful, you will be shocked to see it, you will understand what elegance is. Watching it walk on the beach with its slender legs, the courtship period of one male and one female to each other, they will turn their heads back to the sky and shout, wings flapping, so beautiful. Why did I become a bird watcher? It has something to do with the Grey Crane. One year I went to Rongcheng, Shandong Province, with a friend from East China Normal University to see swans, and I was honored to see a family of cranes, a father, a mother, a small crane, and a family foraging on the beach. Now that I'm telling you this story, I can think of the scene when I saw the crane. I lay on the beach and watched the family walk, and I fell in love with it. Although I had started bird watching at that time, I didn't love it so much, but this crane really made me fall in love at first sight. We should encourage the public to go out into the wild to admire these beautiful creatures.
The next bird, I want to share with you is the story of the people behind it. It has a very famous researcher, under what circumstances did this researcher study this bird? He was in a concentration camp. The British tradition of bird watching is long, but unfortunately, there was a world war. The bird watcher was unfortunately captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a German concentration camp. As a result, he found three bird watchers like him, who formed a bird watching group to observe birds in the concentration camp. The book "Seasons of Birdsong" mentions this history.
Luckily, all four survived. One of them observed the Eurasian red-tailed plover nesting in a concentration camp house for three full years to see when it would breed, how many litters it would have, when the chicks would hatch, what bugs its parents would feed it, and so on. Later, at the end of World War II, he returned to England to write a book called "Eurasian Red-tailed Plover", which was the first very detailed research book on the Eurasian Red-tailed Plover. The most amazing thing is that this person later went to the university to teach literature, not ornithology. Three of his friends have also achieved very high success, one of whom became the president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a very well-known bird protection organisation in the UK, leading bird conservation throughout the UK. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is the UK's most member conservation organisation, protecting birds in the UK and around the world.
The other was so ill in the camp that the Germans released him back to England early. The first piece of British territory he saw on his way home was a small island, and he said: "This island is a particularly good breeding ground for seabirds, and I will come to this place to do research in the future." "As a result, he really went to that island to do research after he got well. Now that island has become a very famous bird watching spot in Britain, you can see a lot of lost birds - many birds get lost during migration and come to the island. He also guided the return of the osprey, a fish-eating bird of prey. At that time, due to the use of pesticides, many bird eggs broke and could not hatch, of which the osprey was the most affected bird, and he later reintroduced the osprey back to England.
You see that there are really endless possibilities in life. Zhu Lei, the translator of "Birdsong Season", is a doctor of ornithology graduated from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he has a WeChat public account called "Birds and Birds with Sounds", which specifically introduces the stories of these four people.
When the new crown epidemic broke out, there was a group of bird watching enthusiasts in Wuhan who watched birds on their balconies, and as a result, they had a lot of interesting discoveries, and they published a book called "Birds Outside the Window", which talked about their bird watching experience in Wuhan during the new crown epidemic.
You see no matter what kind of environment people are in, as long as you have something you love, then you can always do something different. This is also the story of the birds that I want to share with you.
Finishing/Rain Station