The Chinese diners eating a rare songbird into extinction and the conservationists fighting to save it.
I'm pleased to share my second article for the South China Morning Post and my forth about bird conservation.
The yellow-breasted bunting is a brightly coloured migratory bird which has seen its population drop dramatically in recent years, and is now considered critically endangered.
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| Yellow-breasted Bunting. Photo: Simon Chan |
Experts believe the population crash to be due to the birds' widespread popularity as a delicacy in Southern China. Today, the trade is illegal but it continues undercover.
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| Evidence of the illegal trade (2013). Photo: Simba Chan |
Conservationists are fighting hard to understand the birds' migratory path in order to work out how best to protect the species. In the meantime, the bird has been spotted for sale on China's consumer to consumer website 'Taobao,' (intended for the caged bird trade, rather than for food) and there are calls to put an end to the trade on the site.
An innovative project in Hong Kong's New Territories is fighting back. Volunteers have joined an Eco-paddy club, where they learn how to farm rice and receive a proportion of the crop in return. At the same time, the rice paddies provide food and shelter for the Yellow-breasted buntings as they fly south for the winter.
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Volunteers harvest rice in Hong-Kong's Long Valley. Photo: Wyman Koo
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Please go
here to read the full published article or click
here to download the pdf to see it in print.
I'd like to thank Vivian Fu of the Hong-Kong Bird Watching Society who first suggested I write about this. For more on the Taobao story and efforts to stop the sale of endangered birds on the shopping site check out birdingbeijing.com run by China-based Terry Townshend.
