Hi all -
Though my birding knowledge in China is pretty limited, I'll comment
a little because I've spent a lot of time there over the past 15+
years.

Though there are bright spots, the overall population pressures &
rapid economic growth have devastated much of eastern China's
landscape. Politics played a role too, but less so than is often
imagined. Without looking it up, I recall learning that 99% of
China's forests were logged off _before_ the 1949 founding of the
People's Republic. And the population was already over 400 million by
then. Mao-era policies definitely were more efficient at scarring the
landscape, but things were already bad before industrialization &
late-20th century politics came into the picture.

As you get away from the east coast [where ~90% of the population
lives], there still are many places without as much pollution,
crowding & environmental destruction. But though there are more bird
species in China [1200+] than in the US, density of birds certainly
seems noticeably lower throughout the country.

Extinct & endangered birds: I've done just a tiny bit of digging for
info on this and was mostly surprised to find better results than I
expected - I didn't find mention of any species that have gone
extinct in the last century in China, and those that were most
critically endangered seemed mostly to be marsh & water birds -
Chinese Crested Tern, White-eared Night Heron, Crested Ibis,
Black-faced Spoonbill, some Cranes. The exception to this seems to be
some pheasants & partridges, such as the Sichuan Partridge. What is
surprising to me about this is that the smaller passerines don't show
up on CITES & Birds-to-Watch lists as endangered or critically
endangered.

Since sparrows [very broadly defined, probably more akin to
passerines in general] were the birds targeted by that Mao era
campaign mentioned in an earlier email, it would seem that effects of
it would have shown up amongst passerines if we were looking for
clear lines from the bird-killing activities to present populations.
Instead, the birds on the brink in China are those not directly
targeted by political campaigns -- To me that means the place to
target concerns is on the pressures of economic growth & population
growth, which together still continue to place huge strains on China.

There has been a depressing conversation lately over on the "Oriental
Birding" list about the virtual disappearance of Baer's Pochard. A
February extensive Yangtze River watershed survey conducted by the
WWF turned up only 8 Baer's Pochards among the 600,000+ waterbirds,
despite this being one of their supposed key wintering locations.
Several other birders from Thailand, Korea & China have reported the
similar absence of this bird. One reported that as recently 1988 he
saw 116 in a Beijing park in migration, while in the past couple
years none at all have appeared in the entire province surrounding
Beijing. Most recently, we received word of draught-&-farming induced
wildfires in a nature reserve in NE China where Baer's Pochards,
Siberian Cranes & many other migrating threatened species used to be
able to find refuge. Until these fires, protection measures in this
area had produced encouraging results, including a surprise discovery
of 550 Baikal Teal in 2004 [maybe the home of our visitor?]

On the positive side, that same waterbird survey turned up higher
than expected numbers for several other species, indicating that some
of the more recent protective measures might be having a little
effect.

If any one is still interested in this topic in a month, let me know
-- I leave on Saturday for 3 weeks over in China and hope to see what
spring birding in Beijing, Shanghai & some of the more remote areas
is like. The density of birds won't match the wonders of
Tweetersland, but the excitement at finding new-to-me birds will more
than make up for that.

Good birding,

Matt Bartels
Seattle, WA

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