A Visit to the Dongtan Wetlands

Text: Fraser Newham

Zhang Kejia peers through the lens of his high-powered telescope, across the coastal mud flats. From his vantage point on a man-made seawall, he is counting hooded cranes.

“Thirty eight today,” he says to me after a moment. “Two less than Monday. Maybe the other two are still over at the pool - they spend the night there.”

Chongming Island

I am at Dongtan Reserve on Chongming Island, the largest reserve for seasonal birds in East Asia. Chongming Island is in the Yangtze Delta. It a sleek, flat accumulation of sediment, material eroded and transported by the Yangtze as it rolls through the country, from Tibet, to Yunnan, to Sichuan and beyond. The island has grown steadily over the last thousand or so years, now reaching sizable proportions, for Chongming is the third largest island in China (after Taiwan and Hainan), and the largest alluvial island (that is – island formed by river silt) in the world. And, like the fertile coast of Jiangsu Province to the north, as the river continue to flow, Chongming continues to grow – by two and a half inches every day.

The wetland area stretches across the eastern coast of the island, and with a total size of 326 square kilometres, occupies perhaps a quarter of the island’s total area. Dongtan Reserve is a state-protected wetlands area, comprising fresh and salt water marshes, tidal creeks and mud flats, and it is the home to a variety of animal and bird life, including several endangered species. It has been listed as a Ramsar site, in line with the international agreement for the protection of wetland regions formulated at Ramsar, Iran in 1971. It is also the site chosen by the World Wildlife Fund to serve as the Chinese flagship for their Yellow Sea Eco-region Programme.

My guide at Dongtan, Zhang Kejia, is a conservationist by training and a worker at the Dongtan Nature Reserve. Keen to share his knowledge and an excellent speaker of English, he is a tremendous advertisement for conservation in China.

Part of Zhang’s job is to monitor bird numbers at the reserve – today he is counting hooded cranes, wintering at Dongtan before returning to the northern province of Heilongjiang in the spring. They are an endangered species, and their movements are watched closely.

“There are a thousand hooded cranes in China,” he tells me. “And another nine thousand in Japan. They like the environment at Dongtan-they eat the roots of the grass on the mudflat.”

He passes the lightweight telescope to me; in the raw winter sun, the clarity of image is astounding, as, from hundreds of metres distant I watch a graceful white bird pick its way through the wet landscape, its steps exaggerated like a tip-toeing drunk.

The stillness is unchallenged. We are alone on the seawall; the mudflat stretches before us and we can barely make out the sea, only a suggestion of silver underlining the sky. At one point – only one point – we would encounter some local farmers, harvesting reeds which they will use to make paper, loading an already heaving tractor. But, as for now, there is no-one.

“Of course the best bird watching is in spring and autumn,” Zhang goes on. “The migratory birds pass through. In the spring we get around sixty black faced spoon bills, coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam, returning to Korea where they will spend the summer. They are very endangered – there are only one thousand left in the world. Simply because of loss of habitat like this.”

I reposition the telescope – I want to investigate some black spots in the distance. Water buffalo.

In southern China you encounter water buffalo fairly regularly – if you visit Yellow Mountain, or go cycling around Yangshuo. But not like this. Not in herds, not roaming so freely. We were in one of the most densely populated regions on the world, and, right now, it was almost like being in Africa. And, I have to say, it felt really, really good.

Pressures and Change

Chongming Island is a largely rural community. Farming and fishing are the dominant economic activities – pig farming is important, andthroughout China the best calligraphy brush heads are made from local goats’ wool. And while the birds of Dongtan may enjoy small wild crabs they find in the pools of the mudflat, nearby urban consumers can't get enough of the larger commercially farmed crab for which the island is famous.

But change is coming. The opening of the Three Gorges Dam far upstream has affected Chongming Island in two ways. Firstly, farming families from now submerged areas near the dam have been resettled on the island. Secondly, the dam has greatly reduced the quantity of sediment brought to the lower reaches of the river; the island will not keep growing for ever.

And a second pressure threatens Chongming’s unspoilt ecology. For those moneyed urban consumers cracking the shells of Chongming crabs are the aspirant Shanghai middle-class. Chongming is part of the Shanghai municipality, and, with the skyscrapers of Pudong (not so long ago itself a landscape of godowns, water buffalo and fields) now all but built, the city planners are looking one step further removed. At present Chongming can only be reached by boat; by 2007, there will be connections by bridge and tunnel, not only to Shanghai in the south, but also to Jiangsu’s Nantong City in the north.

Does this spell the end for Chongming’s ecosystem? Perhaps not. The island’s Qianwei Ecological Village and the Dongping National Forest Park have demonstrated the potential profitability of ecotourism; there are plans to bring ecotourism to the Dongtan reserve as well. If it can be demonstrated that there is money to be made from environmental conservation, then it is possible that Dongtan can do for natural environments what the Xintiandi development in downtown Shanghai – the tasteful conversion of a rambling area of shikumen-alleyway housing into a complex of chic bars and restaurants - has done for traditional architecture, and create a situation where developers recognise there is more potential profit in preservation than wholesale redevelopment. That would be a fine thing indeed.

With thanks to Zhang Kejia for his assistance with this article and to Yuan Xiao for the use of his photographs.

The author is interested in hearing from people involved in environmental protection in China, and can be contacted at fraser1999@yahoo.com