I can now see hundreds of birds of prey a day, which I usually only see by luck.

Every bird watcher wants to see birds of prey . I have heard many reasons for liking birds of prey: some say they are majestic, others say they make you feel free when you see them.

You need luck to see raptors. When I usually go bird watching in Guangzhou, if I am lucky, I can see a few kestrels, black kites, etc. in a day. However, this autumn, I saw hundreds of raptors for several consecutive days - such a good place is the raptor monitoring point.

Common buzzard in Guantouling｜Photographed by: ChanIm

Last October, my husband ChanIm and I traveled to Beihai, Guangxi, and we visited Guantouling. Guantouling is a small hill in the southwest of Beihai, Guangxi, surrounded by the sea on three sides. Every autumn, a large number of birds of prey set out from South Korea, Japan and other places, along the southeastern coastal areas of my country, passing through Guantouling, and heading to Southeast Asia for wintering. It is no exaggeration to say that the number of birds of prey I saw in Guantouling in one day during the migration season is more than what I have seen elsewhere in a whole year.

This year, as volunteers for the Beautiful Nature Project, we conducted a week-long raptor monitoring mission . While enjoying the sight of raptors flying high and improving our identification skills, we were also able to contribute to bird and environmental protection as citizen scientists. How could such a good thing happen in the world?

What are the benefits of being a monitor?

For individuals, participating in raptor monitoring can improve the level of bird watching . Usually, I only know a few common raptors in my range, and I hardly know the others. The reason is simple, that is, I have seen too few. Before setting off, we looked at the "three little eagles" that looked exactly the same in the atlas, and always suspected that we would pollute the project data.

The "three little eagles" refer to the common sparrowhawk, Japanese sparrowhawk and brown-eared eagle in Guantouling. The adult birds of these three eagles are easy to distinguish, but because of the choice of migration route, a large proportion of the birds passing through Guantouling are young birds. Putting them together is like "spot the difference" . However, after a few days of field practice and comparing photos and counting them every night, by the end of the monitoring period, I could occasionally identify them in the air with a telescope.

In order: Brown-eared Hawk, Sparrowhawk, Japanese Sparrowhawk | ChanIm

The key points to identify the "Three Little Eagles" include the ratio of tail length to body length, throat centerline, tail color band, flight feather horizontal stripes, etc., which need to be considered comprehensively.

1) The black horizontal stripes on the flight feathers of the Brown-eared Hawk are narrow and discontinuous;

2) Sparrowhawks have a thick mid-throat and a tail-to-trunk length ratio close to 1:1;

3) The Japanese Sparrowhawk has a thin mid-throat, a tail-to-trunk length ratio of less than 1:1, and a significantly longer wing finger P6 (yellow arrow).

It doesn’t matter if you feel dizzy, just practice at Guantouling and you will remember it.

From the perspective of ecological protection, raptor monitoring is an even more important task, the purpose of which is to collect basic scientific data and understand the survival status of raptors .

As top predators, raptors control the number of insects and rodents, and maintain the health of farmland, grasslands and other environments. They are usually scattered in their respective territories, and only appear in large numbers during the migration season. Therefore, the migration season is an excellent opportunity to count the number of raptors .

Monitoring data of my monitoring period (click to view larger image)｜Beautiful Nature

The most common gray-faced buzzard I encountered during monitoring, they often flock through Guantouling during the migration season｜ChanIm

The presence of monitors and bird watchers can also help prevent poaching and protect the safety of migratory birds of prey.

Guantouling used to be a severely affected area for poaching. After years of monitoring and patrolling, as well as the local government's anti-gangster and anti-evil campaign, it finally ushered in the first "zero gunfire" migration season in 2022. However, poaching in other forms such as bird nets still exists, and poaching news occasionally comes to light in other areas. Therefore, raptor monitoring is not only for watching raptors, but also for seeing raptors every year.

Even if I am not an expert in identification, can I still participate in the monitoring?

When I talked about this experience with my friends, one of them said, "I want to participate in raptor monitoring, but I'm afraid my identification skills are not good enough..."

To be honest, I thought so before I was approved. Identifying raptors is not really my strong point - I rarely go somewhere to "add new sights" and prefer to see familiar birds in familiar places and observe their behavior for a long time. But after the actual monitoring, I found that as long as you have basic bird watching experience and study the training courses seriously, identifying raptors is not difficult.

The biggest difficulty in identifying birds of prey is that there are too few opportunities to observe them. As the king at the top of the food chain, the number of birds of prey in the ecosystem is far less than that of other herbivorous or omnivorous birds, and it is rare to see them. If you just stick to the illustrations, the knowledge will not enter your brain. It was not until the project training that Shi Xu, the raptor monitoring training instructor, showed us a large number of photos and compared and explained each of their characteristics. Only then could I match the illustration descriptions with the species bit by bit (I felt like an image recognition AI in training).

Illustrations and descriptions | China Bird Observation Manual

The descriptions in the atlas are scientific and rigorous but abstract, and need to be understood in combination with field observations. Due to space limitations, the atlas can only show a few "standard photos" of a species. When we look through the atlas for a bird, it is difficult to grasp the most important characteristics of the species, and it is easy to be distracted by unimportant details. However, through real photo records and on-site observations, we can see different angles, different postures, and even different color types of birds of prey, and patterns at different stages of molting. Combined with the explanations of experts, we can grasp the overall characteristics of the species, commonly known as "looking at the temperament."

For example, one of the characteristics of the Japanese Sparrowhawk is that it is slender and cylindrical, which is different from the sturdy spindle-shaped Brown-eared Hawk. In addition, many birds of prey have obvious brow ridges, which look majestic, but the Japanese Sparrowhawk seems to lack that momentum... When I first started bird watching, I also thought that such a description was very abstract, but after seeing it more, I got to know it .

In between studies, make some memes | Map: Maya Blue

Moreover, raptor monitoring does not rely entirely on on-site identification by volunteers . Bird-watching enthusiasts on site also provide very useful reference opinions. When sorting out photos every night, some raptors that cannot be identified at the monitoring site can also be identified. Even if they cannot be recognized, the number of raptors passing through is also useful data .

In fact, raptor identification is only part of the monitoring work. The monitoring team also needs to take photos, count the number, enter data, and conduct on-site science education, etc. Each task is very important. During the time when I was on duty, tourists who wanted to go to the beach often entered the monitoring point by mistake because of the wrong map navigation route. At this time, the monitoring volunteers need to explain the situation to the tourists and introduce our raptor monitoring activities. Some tourists will leave directly, but there are also many interested tourists who will stay and wait with us. When they finally saw the raptor, everyone was very surprised.

What many regions refer to as “eagles” are actually black kites｜ChanIm

More than one person asked, "Will the raptors attack us?"

The simple answer is: No. People may have heard some old legends about large eagles catching chickens and children in farmland. However, with the changes in society, such large birds of prey are now very rare and have learned to fear humans. As for small birds of prey such as sparrowhawks, they are about the size of pigeons and feed on insects, rodents and small birds. They are not a threat to humans. We just need to be careful not to approach the nests of birds of prey during the breeding season, and do not rush to approach birds of prey when we find them in need of rescue (please contact 12345 immediately to transfer to local rescue agencies).

So, how do you participate in raptor monitoring?

For busy modern people, the most basic and most luxurious requirement for participating in formal raptor monitoring is probably more than a week of free time . Considering the cost of project training and personnel handover, most volunteer projects require at least one week of continuous monitoring. In addition, in order to adapt to all-weather outdoor monitoring, basic physical fitness and outdoor experience are also required.

Not in the mood for work, make some memes｜Maya Blue

Regarding the registration of monitoring projects, you can follow the organizations you are interested in. The monitoring period of raptor autumn migration generally starts at the end of August and ends in early November. Organizations that need to recruit volunteers usually release recruitment information through official accounts and other channels about a month before the monitoring period.

Main raptor monitoring sites and organizations in mainland China | "2023 Autumn Migration Report of Migratory Birds of Prey Monitoring Network in Mainland China", SEE Let Birds Fly

If you are temporarily unable to participate in the formal monitoring, you can also do casual bird watching at your own pace, "airdrop" to the monitoring point, and assist in identification as a public volunteer . During the Guantouling monitoring period, public volunteers helped us a lot. Some of them have amazing eyesight and can always be the first to discover birds of prey and make identifications; some are well-equipped and take high-quality photos to help us identify many birds of prey that we could not see clearly at the moment. Moreover, every bird watcher who comes to the monitoring point, stays and eats here, is making a small contribution to the local ecotourism, giving local people more motivation to protect birds.

Encountering birds at monitoring points during the migration season is a tacit understanding between bird lovers. The peak of autumn raptor migration is usually in mid-to-late September in North China and in mid-to-late October in coastal areas of South China, which is also the busiest time for each monitoring point. If you can't wait, the spring migration starts around March , so you can prepare after the Spring Festival.

In addition to raptor monitoring, there are many other bird-related citizen science projects , such as bird strike surveys, mudflat waterbird surveys, breeding seabird surveys, etc. I really want to unlock these experiences one by one. By the way, there is also a world-class "raptor viewing site", Batumi, Georgia, where tens of thousands of raptors can be seen in one day during the migration season. I hope that one day I can also become a volunteer there.

Following the pace of the seasons and always feeling hopeful is probably the greatest joy of bird watching.

References

Shi Xu. 2023 Autumn Migration Report of Migratory Birds of Prey Monitoring Network in Mainland China. SEE Let Birds Fly. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qVKuYX_6w9Dx62_UXX7YDQ. 2024-09-12.

Author: Maya Blue

Editor: Mai Mai

Image source: ChanIm

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)