birding...

White-capped Water Redstart Chaimarrornis leucocephalus ©Alister Benn http://www.availablelightimages.com

“In Guizhou you will never see three consecutive days of sunshine, three taels of silver, or three mou of flat land !” This traditional Chinese saying does a disservice to colourful Guizhou, which has a significant population of ethnic minorities and some spectacular areas of karst limestone landscape.

Guizhou (capital Guiyang) has borders with Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangxi and Hunan.

For the birder, perhaps the most famous site in west Guizhou Province is Caohai (the ‘Sea of Grass’) in Weining county, which is on the same 2,000m plateau as Zhaotong in neighbouring northeast Yunnan. Caohai is a good place to see Black-necked Cranes, with up to 400 wintering between mid-November and the end of March. The hedgerows around villages at the edge of of Caohai are a place for Daurian Redstart, Brown-breasted Bulbul and White-browed Laughingthrushes. In an area with few mature trees, Grey-headed Woodpeckers will search for grubs under the eaves of traditional houses. There are also good numbers of Bar-headed Geese, Red-crested Pochard and other wintering duck.

Three hours’ drive from Weining, the rather scrubby woodland of Tuoda Forest Farm is a site for Reeves’ Pheasant, although this has become rather more difficult to find in recent years.

Guizhou’s highest peak, Fanjing Shan (2,570m) in the northeast, is a site for Temminck’s Tragopan for those hardy enough to climb the 6,000 stone steps to the summit. At the top may also be seen Blue-fronted Redstart and Elliot’s Laughingthrushes close to the eastern end of their ranges.

Guizhou Province is little-visited by birders or other tourists and is still poorly known ornithologically. For example, the Chinese endemic Gold-fronted Fulvetta is known from neighbouring sites in Sichuan Province, and also in Guangxi to the south, but there are no recent records from Guizhou in the area between these two places. Who knows what else is waiting to be discovered?