Another Year of ‘Bird Protection Week’ in Cixi, Zhejiang – Discover the Cute Stories of the Birds!
Since 1982, China has held an ‘International Migratory Bird Protection Week’ every year, this is the 38th year. The time of ‘International Migratory Bird Protection Week’ is from April to early May. Due to the differences in local environment and climate conditions, the specific time is determined by provinces, cities, and regions.
Our Zhejiang Province’s ‘International Migratory Bird Protection Week’ is from April 10th to 16th this week. This year’s ‘International Migratory Bird Protection Week’ theme is ‘Bird Protection in the New Era, Building a Good Ecology’.
Just in time for ‘International Migratory Bird Protection Week’, I’ve selected three interesting anecdotes from the bird photographs I’ve taken in recent years to share with my bird photography friends.
Favorite Air-Conditioned Cavity
The bird that likes to approach humans most is undoubtedly the common sparrow. The body length of the common sparrow is 14-16 cm. The back is chestnut-red with black longitudinal stripes, with yellow longitudinal stripes on the sides; the chin, throat, and upper breast are black, the face is white, and the lower body is white. The wings have white banded patterns.
Common sparrows like to inhabit human-inhabited environments, whether in mountains, plains, hills, grasslands, swamps, and fields, or in towns and villages, wherever there are human settlements, you can find them.
This fellow is lazy, and whenever the breeding season is approaching, it always likes to find air-conditioned cavities in residential buildings to choose a place to ‘raise its young’.
I’ve been observing common sparrows for many years, and so have shining thrushes.
The body length of the shining thrush is 20-23 cm. The beak is red, the foot is orange-yellow. The male has white or brownish-white feathers on its head and neck, the back is dark gray, the chest is gray, becoming lighter towards the back, and the wings and tail are black. The female has brownish-white feathers on the top of its head, dark gray on the back, grayish-brown on the upper body, light grayish-brown on the lower body, and other parts are similar to the male.
This set of pictures was taken by me near my home in recent years.
Plastic Sheet on the Fence
Yesterday, I saw a scene like this on a bridge in the forest park: A White-vented Warbler was intently tearing a white piece of plastic sheet.
The formal name of the White-vented Warbler is ‘White-vented Warbler’, it belongs to the Thrush family in the Passeriformes order, it is a small bird that inhabits south of the Yangtze River in China, it is the second most numerous bird in the city of Cixi after the common sparrow. It is lively and not afraid of humans.
At this time, it didn’t know why it wanted to tear up this white plastic sheet, so I stood at a distance to watch until it flew away.
Swallows Weaving
The ‘swallows’ we say in Cixi are actually ‘house swallows’. They are summer migratory birds, they come to our city around the Qingming Festival and fly to the south when the autumn wind blows up.
House swallows belong to the swallow genus in the swallow family. The beak is short and broad, with a wide base, triangular, with a notch on the upper beak near the tip; the mouth slit is very deep, and the bristles are underdeveloped. The wings are long and pointed, the tail is forked, forming ‘tail feathers’, the feet are short and delicate, with three toes in front and one in the back. The main characteristics are the upper body is blue-black and has a metallic luster, the ventral side is white.
The body is light and agile, the wings are long and narrow, and when flying, it seems like a sickle, the tail splits like scissors. It flies quickly like an arrow, and it can quickly change direction.
This set of ‘swallows weaving’ was taken on July 1, 2017: A derelict steel wire was in the sky, with a suspended cable in the middle, and the background was a yellow residential building.
Perhaps the White-vented Warbler desperately wanted to tear up the white plastic sheet because it smelled a familiar scent, how can we explain the ‘over-knotting’ of this swallow with the cable?
PicShen Bin Xuan
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