Pere David's Deer at Dafeng

Asia » China » Jiangsu » Yancheng
September 28th 2013

Published: September 28th 2013

I didn't do much on my last day in Xian, mostly trying to organise stuff on the internet. I did go to the Bird Market which was a few streets away from my hostel. The first sellers I passed mostly had lots of canaries and budgies, a few Bengalese and some Gouldian finches, with just one having wild-caught birds (a cage packed with yellow-bellied tits). As I got deeper into the alleys the wild birds started appearing, with cages crammed full of Mongolian larks, Siberian rubythroats, redstarts, Pekin robins, yellow-bellied tits, white-eyes and, surprisingly, tree sparrows. Those were all in big numbers; in lesser numbers were bluethroats, hill mynahs, hawfinches (including some dyed ones), niltavas, red-tailed minlas, elegant buntings, crested tits, hwameis, Chinese bulbuls, blackbirds, skylarks, a few spot-necked doves,a couple of azure-winged magpies and just one red-billed blue magpie. The mammal section was almost non-existent, mostly rabbits and guinea pigs except for one red squirrel and some cages full of little piles of Siberian chipmunks. The aquatic section was interesting too, mostly lots of goldfish in polystyrene tubs and hundreds of baby and adult turtles. There were tubs filled inches deep with baby red-eared sliders, poured in as if they were grain. I'm not good at turtle identification but there were quite a few species represented in the market, including softshells, baby snapping turtles (?) and Cuora species. Then there were the tubs of water filled with tiny albino clawed frogs (Xenopus) dyed bright flourescent blue, yellow, green and pink. All of these animals are being sold as pets (not food!). As well as the animals themselves, there are little bamboo bird cages, boxes of mealworms and jumbo-worms, and tubs of live tubifex and bloodworms for the fish. There was even one shop packed solid with neon-coloured plastic aquarium plants.

I took an overnight train from Xian to Shanghai. The thing I never get used to with all the pushing and shoving (not just in China, but Indonesia etc also) is that while I can understand it on city buses for example (lots of people, limited space on the bus, so first in first served) what possible purpose does it provide when boarding a train or a plane? Everybody has a ticket for a reserved seat! Madness. The train left Xian at about 9pm and arrived in Shanghai eleven hours later the next morning. The sleepers were 800 Yuan more expensive than just a plain seat, so I had taken a plain seat. It turned out a “seat” wasn't actually a seat as I had been imagining, instead it was in a cabin the same as one of the regular sleeper cabins but there were six people in it so you sat three people to each of the lower beds. One of the six was a baby, so her and her mother slept on one of the top beds. The other three people all sat on one of the lower beds, so I in fact got to sleep lying down after all on the other lower bed. Nice.

The place I was heading for was the Dafeng Milu National Nature Reserve, north of Shanghai. Milu is the Chinese name for the Pere David's deer. Remember the Przewalski’s horses I saw in Mongolia? The ones that were extinct in the wild but reintroduced from animals bred in zoos? Well the Pere David's deer is another no-longer-extinct-in-the-wild animal. I'll explain all about that in a minute. I had tried to do enough research before leaving New Zealand to enable me to get to the reserve without too much kerfuffle but as I have been finding out, nothing on the internet is true when it comes to China. First the phone numbers I'd found for the reserve were all wrong, but eventually the girls at the Warriors Youth Hostel in Xian had found a good one on a Chinese site. There was supposed to be accommodation at the reserve but when they rang to check that for me the answer was no, there is no accommodation at the reserve (except it turned out that there was!). So instead I booked a hotel in Dafeng itself (the city) called the Golden Apple Hotel. To get to the reserve from Shanghai I was, according to the tourist information sites, to take a bus to Yancheng four hours north of Shanghai and then another bus from there to Dafeng and then there were buses from there to the reserve (or also, apparently, there were two direct buses a day straight from Yancheng to the reserve). When I got off the train in Shanghai I went straight to the ticket counter at the Bus Station which, handily enough, is in the train station and bought a ticket to Yancheng. The person right behind me in line saw my note on which was written “Yancheng” in Chinese, and right below it “Dafeng” in Chinese, and then below that “Dafeng Milu National Nature Reserve” in Chinese, and immediately asked why I was going to Yancheng if I wanted the Milu reserve in Dafeng. It turned out that of all the people in the station trying to get bus tickets for probably dozens of different destinations, this guy was going to Dafeng himself and he spoke good English. How fortuitous is that!? Is name was Wang Bin and I discovered that there is in fact a direct bus from Shanghai to Dafeng – and it costs less than the bus to Yancheng does! He took me over to the refund counter and got my ticket changed for one to Dafeng and half an hour later were off on the bus for the three-and-a-half hour ride. The next bit of information I discovered is that there are no buses from Dafeng to the reserve! It is 50km out of town, and I would have to take a taxi if I wanted to visit, costing 130 Yuan each way.

Dafeng has a lot of hotels in all price ranges, but nothing in the backpacker line. Most of them seem to be “business hotels” which I don't think is a euphemism. The Golden Apple Hotel is one of the cheaper ones and it is quite nice I must say. The girls at Warriors had booked me in for four nights at 90 Yuan per night for a single room (which is about NZ$18, so pretty cheap). I don't think Dafeng gets much in the way of foreign tourists (by which I mean “any”) – people in the street seem a little stunned. Nobody at the hotel speaks English, but I already knew because I'd checked in advance. When I arrived there was much confusion as to what I was doing there, which was rather surprising because how many foreigners were they expecting that day? They started out by (as far as I could tell) flatly refusing that there were 90 Yuan rooms, then they got an English speaker on the phone and I explained that I had been booked in for 90 Yuan per night. Then they showed me two different types of rooms, a smaller 90 Yuan room and a huge 138 Yuan room which was as big as a house! I think the initial confusion was caused by them not thinking that a foreigner would want the small room, but it was plenty big enough for me and it had a toilet and shower inside – even a tv – which is more than I usually get.

The next morning it was pouring down but I took a taxi to the reserve anyway to try and see the Pere David’s deer. This deer was once found in swamplands right across China but the ever-increasing human population gradually reduced both the numbers of the deer and the wetlands they needed for survival, and eventually they became restricted almost solely to the walled hunting preserves of the Chinese royalty. The very last remnant of the species held on in the Nanyuang Royal Hunting Garden in what is now southern Beijing. This huge compound had been sealed off from the common folk for seven hundred years by the time the first Westerner poked his head over the wall in 1864 and saw the herds of deer. The Westerner was French missionary Armand David (Pere David means “father David”). Pere David spent quite some time in China, discovering literally hundreds of new species of plants and animals, probably the most famous plant being the dove tree and the most famous animal being the giant panda. Despite being a missionary he had no problem bribing the reserve’s guards to procure him some poached skins and skulls of the new deer (which surely must have resulted in those guards’ executions!!) and he sent these off to Europe to be named. It wasn’t long before some live Pere david’s deer were also obtained for European zoos through some sort of five-fingered discount. This was extremely fortunate because just thirty years after Pere David’s discovery a massive flood in 1895 broke down parts of the reserve’s walls and the escaping deer were butchered and eaten by those god-damn starving peasants. Seriously, nothing but trouble those peasants. Fewer than thirty deer remained alive within the reserve, and in 1900 these were all killed and eaten during the Boxer Rebellion.

This wasn’t quite the end for the Pere David’s deer. Back in Europe, top bloke the Duke of Bedford gathered up the last eighteen animals left in European zoos (only eleven of which were still able to reproduce) and put them in his extensive deer park at Woburn Abbey where they bred and bred and bred. In the 1980s the first Pere David’s deer in almost a hundred years returned to China. Today there are probably a couple of thousand in China in a variety of reserves. Technically they aren’t “wild” because they are managed populations but that’s a bit picky really. The Dafeng Milu National Nature Reserve contains almost a thousand deer living free in its swamplands and they are probably about as wild as they’re going to get in China.

The reserve at Dafeng wasn't quite what I was expecting. On my China trip outline I have both Yancheng National Nature Reserve and Dafeng Milu Nature Reserve. I had gone for Dafeng first because it was supposed to be the largest milu reserve in China, and that seemed a good thing. Also I gathered that the reserve at Yancheng is really good for wetland birds and, seeing the migrant ducky sorts don't seem to be heading south just yet, I decided to leave Yancheng for now and hopefully get there in December instead when I should theoretically be back in Shanghai and when it is probably a better season.

Wang Bin whom I had met on the bus from Shanghai had told me that I wouldn't need four nights in Dafeng for the reserve because it's not very good, but in my infinite wisdom I thought that was because he wasn't a birder. The impression I had got from internet sources was that it was a huge wetland reserve in which I could wander for days. It may well be, but not the bit that is open to the public. That is an odd sort of garden-slash-museum-slash-mini-zoo . It looks like the actual reserve surrounds the public bit, and there does appear to be a road/track through part of it but the gates were locked. I did see a couple of deer in the trees beyond and got some photos. There is also a viewing platform but it looked like the deer which can be seen from there are confined to that general area. I found another fence-line a bit later, not on the public paths, and saw a small group of deer running in the distance. I'm not that happy with putting them on my mammal list, so I'll do it with an asterisk (i.e. “sort of wild but probably not really”) – for any other mammal I wouldn't be that loose but for Pere David's deer an exception can be made.

There were a few birds around but it was raining quite persistently. I saw a couple of long-tailed shrikes which I like. The ones I saw in Sumatra were much nicer looking because they weren't sitting all hunched up and bedraggled in the rain! There were some cattle egrets around the deer seen from the viewing platform, and around the feet of another group of penned deer were Chinese blackbirds, spot-necked doves, azure-winged magpies and ring-necked pheasants. I've seen ring-necked pheasants in New Zealand of course, but these ones seemed much more attractive. I don't know if it is because they are pure subspecies (as opposed to the mongrelly ones introduced everywhere) or if it was just because I was seeing them in China.

There's not much else to say about it. I was there for two hours and then left in the taxi back to town.

Pere David's Deer at Dafeng

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