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Saturday 2 May to Sunday 17 May 2009 with Paul Holt and Wang Qingyu as leaders. Cost: £2270 plus about £840 for flights Single room supplement: £240 Click here for explanation of price breakdown Please note that single rooms cannot be guaranteed on Happy Island. Maximum group size: 12 with 2 leaders. |
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We’ll start our birding in Xianghai, a huge reserve in Jilin Province near the border with Inner Mongolia. Here we’ll search in particular for the enigmatic Jankowski’s Bunting while other attractions include Daurian Partridge, Swan Goose, Falcated Duck, Oriental Stork, perhaps as many as three species of crane, Asian Dowitcher and Mongolian Lark. From there we’ll head to Beidaihe and Happy Island – sites that are now widely accepted as being among the best places in the whole of Asia to witness eastern Palearctic migrants travelling to and from their breeding grounds in northern China and eastern Siberia. There are always birds to see and with the right conditions, falls of migrants can be truly spectacular. Even without a massive fall, a ‘typical day’ in this area can produce thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, pipits and buntings in profusion. Scanning the skies may reveal good numbers of raptors – Eastern Marsh Harrier can be common while an encounter with a magnificent male Pied Harrier is always something special. Oriental Honey-buzzards, Japanese Sparrowhawks, and Amur Falcons also pass through in good numbers, as do those magnificent aerial masters, White-throated Needletails. We’ll also spend two days on Wulingshan, a wooded mountain northeast of Beijing where fabulous forests hold a number of species that we are unlikely to encounter on the coast such as Koklass Pheasant, Chinese Nuthatch, Grey-sided Thrush, Chinese Flycatcher and Chinese Leaf Warbler. Even though we only stay in five different hotels throughout the entire trip, we can still expect to see over 220 species including such sought-after gems as Red-necked Stint, Saunders’s and Relict Gulls, Siberian Thrush, Siberian Rubythroat, the recently described Chinese Leaf Warbler and Pallas’s Bunting. Whether your interest is in eastern vagrants, or you are looking for an introduction to birding in this impressively bird-rich country, this tour is guaranteed to please. Day 1: The tour begins with a flight from London to Beijing. Day 2: Arriving in the early morning, we’ll transfer straight in to the city. We should have time to visit Tiananmen Square, one of Beijing’s most famous landmarks, before catching a comfortable overnight sleeper train north into what used to be called Manchuria. Night on the train. Day 3: Arriving at Baicheng in the early morning, we’ll set out straight away to search for birds, with the region’s speciality, Jankowski’s Bunting, high on our list. This almost mythical species was discovered here recently, sharing the extensive grasslands with a few Great Bustards, attractive Mongolian Larks, Richard's Pipits and the scarce Pallas's Bunting. Later we’ll drive to the Xianghai National Nature Reserve, which, at about two hours away, will be our base for the following two nights. Day 4: We’ll spend a full day at Xianghai Nature Reserve, a huge reserve dominated by extensive reed beds, large expanses of open water and grasslands typical of the Mongolian steppe, but also containing tracts of woodland, scrub and agriculture. We’ll search for Swan Geese, Baer’s Pochard, Falcated Duck, Japanese, White-naped and Demoiselle Cranes, Asian Dowitcher, and a variety of other water and grassland birds, such as Daurian Partridge, Amur Falcon, the gorgeous White-winged Black Tern, Oriental Pratincole, and Chinese Grey Shrike. In the evening we’ll head to Kaitong and board an overnight sleeper train south to Qinhuangdao. Day 5: Arriving at the port city of Qinhuangdao we’ll have a short drive south to Beidaihe where we’ll spend the following two nights. Unlike mid-summer, when Beidaihe is thronged with Chinese fleeing the oppressive heat of Beijing and Tianjin, the town will be largely devoid of tourists, save for the occasional foreign bird watcher. Day 6: Situated on the Gulf of Bohai at the northern end of the Yellow Sea, and sandwiched between there and the mountains and deserts of northern Hebei and Chinese Mongolia, Beidaihe and nearby Happy Island are now the destinations for seeing Asian migrants which occur as vagrants in western Europe and North America. Throughout the spring the wooded gardens and gullies of the town, the rocky outcrops and estuaries along the coastline, and the low-lying wooded hills a little way inland, act as magnets to the thousands of birds migrating north. The commoner migrants during early May include Marsh and Terek Sandpipers, Red-necked Stint, Oriental Pratincole, Eyebrowed Thrush, Radde’s, Dusky and Yellow-browed Warblers, Chinese Penduline Tit, and both Little and Black-faced Buntings. Scarcer species that we should also see include Lesser and Greater Sand Plovers, Long-toed Stint, Olive-backed and Richard’s Pipits, Siberian Rubythroat, Pallas's and Pale-legged Leaf-Warblers, Yellow-rumped Flycatcher and Tristram's, Chestnut, Yellow-browed and Yellow-breasted Buntings. As with all migration watch-points, the birding is strongly influenced by the weather. Even on 'quiet' days there should be good numbers of migrants around, but it is the falls of grounded birds and the 'waves' of passing migrants that help make a visit to this area so memorable. Visits in recent years have included such remarkable daily counts as 18 Von Schrenck's Bitterns, 26 Baillon's Crakes, 150 Olive-backed and 70 Red-throated Pipits, 200 Brown Shrikes, 250 Siberian Blue Robins, 100 Yellow-browed, 35 Radde's, 49 Lanceolated, 82 Black-browed Reed and 44 Thick-billed Warblers and 260 Chestnut-flanked White-eyes. Waves of passing birds have included 140 Pied Harriers, over 1000 Crested Honey-buzzards, 667 Pacific Golden Plovers and 276 Little Whimbrels! This really is migration birding at its very, very best. Day 7: We’ll leave Beidaihe heading south for a five night stay on Happy Island. On route we’ll visit a couple of mainland sites, one of them recently named the ‘Magic Wood’ by birders stunned at the incredible variety of birds it contained! Moving on from here we’ll take a 40-minute boat ride over to Happy Island itself. Days 8-11: Happy Island itself isn’t large, stretching just over four kilometres from one end to the other and just under half this at its widest point. However it’s attraction to migrants and the recently improved accommodation make it a wonderful place to go birding. The surrounding sea is shallow and the inter-tidal mudflats are an internationally important staging post for migrating waders. Recent tours have produced over 45 species of wader including Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Asian Dowitcher, Great Knot and Little Whimbrel. We should see a few over-summering Relict Gulls while Saunders's Gull breeds nearby and is normally seen daily. When not scouring the mud flats we’ll be searching for passerines, perhaps the premier attraction of Happy Island. Siberian Rubythroats, Rufous-tailed Robins, Two-barred Greenish and especially Yellow-browed Warblers can be common to abundant while past rarities have included the elusive Fairy Pitta. Day 12: Leaving Happy Island around midday we’ll slowly head back to our original base at Beidaihe where we’ll spend the night. Day 13: We’ll leave Beidaihe early to drive to Wulingshan, which at 2118 metres is the highest mountain close to Beijing. We first explored the protected remnant forest here in the early 20th century and our recent visits have yielded Koklass Pheasant, the endemic Chinese Nuthatch and near endemic Yellow-bellied Tit, Hair-crested Drongo, Chinese and Grey-sided Thrushes, White-bellied Redstart, the recently described Chinese Leaf Warbler, as well as Blyth's Leaf Warbler and Yellow-throated Bunting. The mountain’s two top avian attractions are Grey-sided Thrush and Chinese (or Elisa’s) Flycatcher. Both are globally threatened and only known to breed at a handful of sites in north-eastern China, with Wulingshan being one of the best. Our accommodation for the next two nights will be in a two star hotel surrounded by woodland, right in the heart of the best forest and the best birding. Day 14: We’ll have a full day’s birding in the bird rich forests of Wulingshan. Day 15: Leaving Wulingshan we’ll descend to Miyun, an attractive satellite town to the north of Beijing. Miyun’s attraction for us is its reservoir and associated rivers – a couple of the latter harbour small numbers of Ibisbill and Long-billed Plover and we’ll devote much of the afternoon to finding these enigmatic shorebirds. Night in Miyun. Day 16: We’ll catch a flight back to London where the tour concludes.
E-mail or phone +44 (0)1767 262522 for availability.
Last updated June 2008
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Bird List