1 Day Hainan Island Birding Tour to Danzhou Bay
Tour Overview
The Spring Festival – or Chinese New Year – is a big period for traveling in China. While not on the scale of bird migration, it is routinely and...
Code of Tour: CDT0000088934
Length of Travel: 1 Day
Destinations of Tour:
Departure City: Danzhou
Price of Tour: Request
Type of Tour: Private
Features of Tour:
The Spring Festival – or Chinese New Year – is a big period for traveling in China. While not on the scale of bird migration, it is routinely and somewhat lazily described as the biggest annual migration of humans in the world.
Being somewhat allergic to crowds, I usually avoid traveling during the peak of this period. Instead, I took a birding trip to Hainan ending a few days before the actual Chinese New Year – again with Alpinebirding, despite the lack of anything even remotely looking like the alps on Hainan. Fortunately, they are by now fairly used to dealing with a mediocre birder like me.
Covid turned out not to be too much of a hindrance – I had to show a negative PCR test upon arrival on Hainan from Shanghai, and while many Chinese hotels currently do not accept foreigners, I could leave this issue to my guide.
First stop was Danzhou Bay in the Northwest of Hainan. Like a film star wearing a whig and big sunglasses in a public place, this bird at first glance looks fairly nondescript. But not nondescript enough to fool Bella, my guide.
BIRDING
Birding the Danzhou Bay area (Hainan, China) by day
FEBRUARY 7, 2022 BY KAI PFLUG 2 COMMENTS
The Spring Festival – or Chinese New Year – is a big period for traveling in China. While not on the scale of bird migration, it is routinely and somewhat lazily described as the biggest annual migration of humans in the world.
Being somewhat allergic to crowds, I usually avoid traveling during the peak of this period. Instead, I took a birding trip to Hainan ending a few days before the actual Chinese New Year – again with Alpinebirding, despite the lack of anything even remotely looking like the alps on Hainan. Fortunately, they are by now fairly used to dealing with a mediocre birder like me.
Covid turned out not to be too much of a hindrance – I had to show a negative PCR test upon arrival on Hainan from Shanghai, and while many Chinese hotels currently do not accept foreigners, I could leave this issue to my guide.
First stop was Danzhou Bay in the Northwest of Hainan. Like a film star wearing a whig and big sunglasses in a public place, this bird at first glance looks fairly nondescript. But not nondescript enough to fool Bella, my guide.
When believing to be unobserved, Spoon-billed Sandpipers seem to be fond of scratching themselves despite the slightly awkward look this gives them. I am sure the Danzhou tourist board does not approve, though they are hopefully proud to have 7 of these birds (according to a local bird guide) wintering here.
In another of these tenuous links to something rather irrelevant that this blog hopefully is not famous for yet, there is a great song by Frank Turner, “A wave across a bay”. About Scott Hutchison, singer of the band Frightened Rabbit who committed suicide at a bay in Scotland. To quote Camus again (The myth of Sisyphos) at the massive risk of appearing intellectually pretentious, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”.
