International bird-watching event celebrates ecological success at Hengshui Lake

An international bird-watching cultural exchange event was held on Wednesday at Hengshui Lake in North China's Hebei province, attracting over 100 participants, including international bird experts, students, photographers and tourists.

"Through this exchange event, I personally experienced the achievements of ecological protection here. It is an important platform for global professionals in the field to learn and exchange with each other," said Terry Desmond Townshend, an international bird expert from the UK and founder of the website BirdingBeijing.com.

He first visited Hengshui Lake about 17 years ago and felt very excited and familiar with the second trip here.

"I saw many kinds of birds here. The environment is very good, and the lake is so pure," Saraswoti Adhikari, a Nepalese student from Beijing Forestry University, said as she quickly pressed the shutter button of her camera.

"I think we should protect lakes like this because it is home to many birds, especially migratory birds," she said.

Hengshui Lake, with a water area of 75 square kilometers in the province's Hengshui city, is a national nature reserve that maintains a complete wetland ecosystem of swamps, waters, mud flats, meadows and woodlands on the North China Plain.

It is an important stopover on the East Asia-Australasia migratory bird route. Every autumn and winter, tens of thousands of migratory birds stop here to rest, with numbers exceeding 100,000 at peak times, according to the local government.

In 2024, 336 bird species were recorded, accounting for 69.1 percent of the bird records in Hebei, earning the province the title of "Bird Paradise".

The reserve staff received video footage on Thursday from photographer Zhang Xuefeng, showing around 120 Baer's pochards, a critically endangered diving duck, rarely seen together in the lake area.

In 2017, Hengshui Lake first recorded 308 Baer's pochards settling down. At that time, this was the largest population of this kind discovered worldwide, attracting significant attention from ornithologists and animal conservationists both domestically and internationally.

Subsequently, Hengshui Lake was designated as an "important habitat for the critically endangered Baer's pochard".

The recent sighting of 120 Baer's pochards was the largest population observed at the lake since 2018.