Bone of Tiger, Bile of Bear

In the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, there is a museum devoted to "Chinese Materia Medica". Were I to take you in there, I might ask you to close your eyes. No, I wouldn't tell you why, I'd guide you just a few paces before saying you could open them - provided, that is, you promised to look straight ahead.

Breakfast with hornbills

Early morning at Taman Negara Resort. I stand with a group of birdwatchers gathered by a cluster of chalets, and peer into a tree. Unperturbed by the resort staff and other early risers strolling below, various birds have arrived to snack on fruit. There are green pigeons, fairy bluebirds with iridescent blue backs, irrepressable bulbuls. And pied hornbills, which attract most attention.

Four of these large, improbable birds descend on the tree. They hop and bound along branches, then sidle up to clusters of fruit, move their bills in nearer as if to whisper to the tree, grab a fruit, toss it down their throats, then vault to another part of the tree.

Once most of the resort is up and about, the hornbills fly out from the tree. As if to ensure that late-risers also enjoy the show, they head for trees beside the restaurant, to cavort and trumpet in front of the breakfast crowd.

Whoop. Whoop-whoop! Woo-oo-oooo-ooooo. The forest resounds to a loud, haunting song: the duet of a pair of Bornean gibbons, exuberant as children at a party. I glimpse the two grey primates as they move through leafy branches, swinging gracefully as gymnasts with long slender arms.

Loud honking in trees to my left announces the presence of one of the world's greatest rainforest birds, a rhinoceros hornbill. Well over a metre long, it's mainly black, with a long pale bill topped by a brilliant orange casque that curls up like a small horn. It honks louder and faster, and I hear air whooshing through wings, as it switches trees.

A red ribbon on a sapling indicates where, three months earlier, a researcher looked up to see leafy branches folded together: the temporary nest of a Bornean orang-utan. Nearby, a Rajah Brooke's birdwing - a magnificent butterfly with a shining green band across its long, otherwise jet-black wings, and a red front body - glides across a stream.

Towards sunset, it seems the air is filled with flying Geiger counters, as swiftlets chasing tiny insects emit double-clicks. They belong to only two families of birds that employ echolocation. At night, there's a continual chorus of chirps and ringing chirrups from tree frogs and crickets.

Set in a far-flung corner of Yunnan province, barely a stone’s throw from Tibet and northern Burma, Deqin County is one of China’s most remote places. Search for it on a map, and you find little but the county town, and mountains cut by the upper reaches of three great rivers: the Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze. Beijing lies some two thousand miles to the northeast. So when a logging concession was heading for exhaustion, local officials surely figured they’d have no problems switching operations to another tract of forest. True, given the forest is home to a species listed as nationally protected—Yunnan snub-nosed monkey—they should first obtain permission from the Ministry of Forestry. But, as they say in such parts of China, “The sun is high and the emperor is far away”. The forest was theirs to exploit as they wished.
How wrong they were. From being an obscure administrative district that even many Yunnan people barely knew existed, Deqin has found itself the focus of national attention. Television and newspaper reports have told of officials bending and breaking rules with the aim of exploiting one of China’s beleagured old-growth forests—and have explained that this would push the rare monkey closer to extinction. Directives have come down from the very top tiers of government. A logging ban has been imposed. Heads have rolled.
A complex chain of events unravelled the officials’ plans. Happenstance played a part. So too did environmentalists, wildlife experts, journalists, students, government leaders and others. But trace the chain back to its origin and you find one man: Xi Zhinong, a cameraman with a passion for wildlife whose actions have made him one of China’s foremost conservationists.

Just five years ago [article written early 1990s], it seemed the Gurney's Pitta was slipping quietly into oblivion, if it was not already extinct.  The last documented sighting was in 1952, since when there had only been sporadic reports of Gurney's Pittas entering the wild bird trade.  Its plight had attracted none of the brouhaha that has drawn attention to the likes of Giant Pandas, Black Rhinos and Philippines Eagles, and few would have even noticed that this once common bird of southern Thailand had gone.
  But in 1986 the Gurney's Pitta was rediscovered, and it is now protected and something of a celebrity in Krabi province, home to the bird's last stronghold.  A restaurant and a petrol station in Khlong Thom each have a giant model Gurney's Pitta--the petrol station's is now in need of repair--and a road sign in the town points to `Gurney's Pitta, 18 kilometres'.
  The road does not lead directly to an encounter with the pitta, which is a shy denizen of forest undergrowth, but to the Khao Pra Bang Khran Non-hunting Area.  This was one of four potential Gurney's Pitta sites identified by two ornithologists based at Mahidol University, Phil Round and Uthai Treesucon, who found the bird during a visit in June 1986.

Hunting and habitat destruction have brought these magnificent cats perilously close to extinction. Can the most threatened of the sub-species claw its way back?

Introduction

This plan was prepared following a visit I made to Beidaihe in May 2005, at the request of Mr Cao Ziyu, Director of the People’s Government of Beidaihe. Here, “Beidaihe” covers the coastal area south from the Sandflats (Henghe) to the vicinity of the Yanghe – ie including Beidaihe Haibin (Beidaihe-by-the-Sea) and Nandaihe.

Though the emphasis here is on birds, conservation measures could achieve several positive outcomes, including: