r/beijing • u/SignificantTune5729 • 20d ago
Why don’t I see many birds in Beijing? 🐦
I’m in Beijing and honestly just curious. There’s so much greenery around, but I barely see any birds. Is this normal in Beijing, or am I just not noticing them? 😅
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u/Dry_Perspective9905 20d ago
Beijing has a huge number of birds both due to its massive urban area (pigeons, crows, magpies, blackbird, sparrows, swifts) and rural floodplains (cranes, peasants, herons). Birding is actually a big hobby for people here because the city and suburbs is so well known for all the different migratory birds that travel through here.
Crows will arrive en mass throughout Haidian in October as they roost on many of the campuses and feed in the dumps during the day. My personal favorite are the swifts that hang out around a lot of the temples and towers with eves. They have a distinctive sweptback curve to there wings and are best seen around sunset circling the above types of structures.
Night herons are also a personal favorite. You can always see them around dusk hanging oit around canals and lakes. They usually sit on posts or at the waters edge with a distinctive hunched posture that's really cute. They watch patiently for fish. Despite watching them for long stretches I still have yet to see one actually strike. They tend to hunt mostly at night but in the dark they are tricky to observe.
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u/huajiaoyou 20d ago
I'm close to Dongzhimen, and I have a bunch of loud blue magpies (红嘴蓝鹊) that hang out in the trees outside my window. Also a bunch of little birds too but they aren't as noticeable as the raucous magpies.
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u/No-Sun-3222 19d ago
There’s a nice TedX video about birds in Beijing and how it ranks second in world capitals for the amount of bird species.
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u/Appropriate-Kick-601 17d ago
The other day somebody (not a Beijinger) told me they were all eaten during the Cultural Revolution. Perusing this comments section reminded me of how silly that sounded (I suppose I'd blocked it out of my mind because the same person also tried to peddle racist and anti-science conspiracy theories to me later in the conversation) and invited me to do a quick search to disprove this notion, so thanks to you all for that. It's wild to me how people will just believe some random thing they heard, no matter how dumb it sounds, and not critically evaluate it.
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u/Baphlingmet 15d ago
That's hilarious because my specialty as a historian is the Cultural Revolution and that doesn't make lick of sense. Mass starvation was essentially not a thing in China after the Great Famine of 1956-1962 (food shortages were at times due to supply disruption due to factional fighting, but not to the point people would've need to eat birds en masse). Beijing was actually very well-fed during the Cultural Revolution and even the Great Leap Forward because it was the capital and they needed the working populace to be well-fed to build up the heavy industry they were pushing.
So... yeah, that person was literally pulling that outta their ass lol.
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u/Appropriate-Kick-601 14d ago
Yeah, see that makes so much more sense. I don't know where people get these ideas, nor why they feel the need to spread them without verifying that they're true first. Thanks for sharing your expertise!
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u/Baphlingmet 14d ago
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of foreigners who don't know much about Chinese history often conflate the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as one and the same. So the large death toll from the famine during the GLF, which was indeed tens of millions of people, gets doctored into the Cultural Revolution, hence why you get people saying things on social media like "The Red Guards killed 20 million peasants" and "Millions of emaciated corpses lined the streets of Shanghai in the 1970's"
ADDENDUM: I know this not just because of my research but I know elderly folks who lived in Beijing during the time. They got extra rations and vouchers for things like eggs, tofu, and meat specifically for working on major public works projects rather than living in the countryside. A Beijing houkou was highly desirable for people because it almost certainly guaranteed extra monthly groceries.
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u/Appropriate-Kick-601 13d ago
That makes a lot of sense. I confess, while I definitely know them as two separate events, I don't have a good understanding of what occurred during the two. I should read up on this!
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u/Procrastinaught 16d ago
When I was there I was shocked at the amount of corvids they had. Beijing has plenty of birds in Chaoyang at least.
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u/Baphlingmet 20d ago
I heard from serpentza's ADVChina channel that the CCP killed all the birds in China.
Which is kinda funny cuz I see birds all the time- I hear a bird chirping near my window now.... but what do I know?
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u/hawth212 19d ago
It is true during/after the war but that was a long time ago and plenty of time for recovery.
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u/Intelligent_Flow2026 20d ago
They are all at the Nest exercising…