Nipponia nippon, the Latin scientific name of the crested ibis, symbolizes Japan. This beautiful bird once spread all over Japan. By the 1930s, they had only been observed in Sado, Japan. Despite the efforts of local bird lovers to protect the last crested ibis, the Japanese species of crested ibises was extinct in 1995. The Last Words of the Crested Ibis, which won the Shoichi Japan Otaku Nonfiction Literature Prize, was recently introduced by the Documentary Series of Translations. On the basis of a large number of interviews and investigations, japanese writer Teruyuki Kobayashi tells the beginning and end of the extinction of the crested ibis in Japan, and uses simple and sincere brushstrokes to convey complex emotions such as human enthusiasm, desire, contradiction, and guilt for life.
The crested ibis, once widely distributed in China, Japan, Russia and other places, due to environmental degradation and other factors, led to a sharp decline in populations, once on the verge of extinction. For Shanghai audiences, the crested ibis is no stranger. The classic dance drama "Crested Ibis" of the Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe is based on this rare bird known as "auspicious bird" and "love bird" as the performance object, through moving stories and aesthetic visual presentation, telling the fate of crested ibises and human beings. The dance drama "Crested Ibis" has performed nearly 100 times in Japan, with an audience of 150,000 people, becoming a messenger of Sino-Japanese folk cultural exchanges. In reality, China's crested ibis protection work has also been fruitful. "At present, only China has wild crested ibises, and by 2018, the wild population has exceeded 1700. Crested ibises have also gone abroad, and China has supplied crested ibises to Japan and South Korea. After more than ten years of artificial breeding, Japan and South Korea have re-established artificial populations, and there are currently more than 500 crested ibises in Japan and more than 300 in South Korea. At the new book sharing meeting held at the Pujiang store of Jiantou Bookstore, animal protection expert He Xin introduced this set of data.
"Everyone calls crested ibises love birds, and one of the special things about their weak survivability is that they no longer change their partners after the male and female are paired. Unlike mandarin ducks, which do not have a specific partner and object between male and female, once paired, if the bird of the male and female side disappears or dies for some reason, the other party that survives is no longer paired and will always be a lone bird. In order to understand the survival and protection status of the crested ibis, the writer Chen Xingeng went to Xiazhu Lake in Zhejiang Province and YangXian County in Shaanxi Province in 2017 to interview and investigate, and held the "Crested Ibis's Love" art exhibition in the same year. He introduced that in 1981, only 7 wild crested ibises were found in Yang County, Shaanxi Province, which is the last wild population of crested ibises in China. In the same year, only 5 wild crested ibises were also found in Japan. How is it protected? There are two schools of thought in Japan. One faction is natural breeding, and Haruto Sato, a bird lover who has long observed crested ibises in the folk, advocates first transforming the environment so that crested ibises in the wild can grow naturally; the other is artificial breeding, using scientific and technological means to help crested ibises reproduce. Eventually, people took the latter approach and captured the 5 crested ibises. Until 1995, artificial breeding failed, marking the complete extinction of the Japanese species crested ibis. At that time, Chinese scientists took a different approach than Japan, mainly to maintain the population, except for a few young birds that have lost their nests. YangXian set up a nature reserve and became the base camp of the crested ibis. After years of habitat protection and improvement, artificial breeding and rewilding training, the number of crested ibises in the reserve has reached more than 3,000, which is internationally recognized as one of the models of endangered animal protection. ”
Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe Dance Drama "Crested Ibis"
The reasons for the extinction of the Japanese crested ibises are complex, including late conservation activities, lack of knowledge of protected species, and failure of the Japanese government to intervene in a timely manner. The Last Words of the Crested Ibis is full of people who question the need to protect the crested ibis. But as the book's protagonist, Haruo Sato, replies, "The crested ibis is more than just a bird. It is a life, and life is irreplaceable, just like our human life. "Reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature and regaining reverence for life is an important lesson for the crested ibis and its protectors. Every species is an indispensable link in the biological chain, protecting animals, protecting the environment on which they depend, and protecting the future of mankind. "Although China's crested ibis conservation work has been carried out in a timely manner and achieved remarkable results, from a biological point of view, this species is still very fragile, ensuring genetic diversity is still an important issue in the future, and the risk of epidemic and inbreeding still threatens the safety of the crested ibis population." He Xin said.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Shi Chenlu Text Editor: Shi Chenlu