Suzhou, Shanghai, zoos, birding.....

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With the milu reserve at Dafeng a bit of a bust, I decided not to stay in town four nights after all and instead just got a bus to Suzhou a couple of days early. Suzhou is about an hour out of Shanghai and about three hours from Dafeng. If you look at a map of China it might seem like my route so far has been a bit unusual, from Beijing to Xian to Shanghai-Dafeng-Suzhou and then afterwards to Chengdu. It would have made far more sense to go Beijing to Shanghai to Xian to Chengdu, but the reason for that is that Jess is working in Suzhou now so I had arranged to go see her. Originally she was working in Wenzhou (south of Shanghai) but it was bit too polluted so she moved. The start of October is when she is free so that's what I had to arrange the route around. The first week of October is the so-called “Golden Week,” a week-long public holiday celebrating National Day, and apparently the country goes mental with a billion people all going on holiday at the same time. Suzhou seemed like as good a place as any to hide out. So that's where I have been for the last nine or ten days.

Whilst in Suzhou I made three zoo visits, once to Suzhou Zoo and twice to Shanghai Zoo. The first zoo trip was to Shanghai Zoo. The middle part of the day (at the zoo) was good, the opening and ending parts a little trying. Obviously going to Shanghai Zoo from Suzhou is a bit of a longer trip than most zoo visits so I was intending to get started early, but I didn't. In fact I didn't leave until 8am. I took a local bus to the train station first, and stood in queue for twenty minutes only to discover on getting to the counter that I had left my passport back “home” in my pack. You can't buy things like train tickets without identification, so I had to go all the way back (just missing the bus from the station, too, so had to wait on the next one), get my passport, and bus back to the station again. It wasn't until 9.30am that I actually left Suzhou. The train was only a forty minute trip to Shanghai, then onto the subway for half an hour, change to a different line for twenty minutes, and I was at the zoo by 11.30am.

I got distracted upon entering, by the many wild birds which call the zoo grounds home, as well as Pallas' (red-bellied) squirrels. The squirrels were a little confusing because they are normally a mountain species, but some googling later revealed that they are descended from escaped/released animals and are common now in Shanghai parks. For the first hour and a half I didn't actually look at a single caged animal, I was too busy chasing wild ones. I finally thought I better get down to the zoo business and headed back to the entrance to get started. In brief the Shanghai Zoo is a very good zoo, much better than the Beijing Zoo by a long shot. I liked Beijing, I didn't think it was an awful zoo, but it did have an awful lot of really pretty bad cages. Shanghai in contrast has very few, and of those a good number are only “bad” for aesthetic reasons rather than welfare reasons (I'm not saying that all the other enclosures were brilliant, but they certainly weren't horrible). Also, apart for some people slapping the glass on the red panda enclosure, all the visitors were extremely well-behaved!!! Maybe it is down to how the animals are presented to them. Really the only bad enclosures were the bear pits (as usual) and a lot of the monkey cages which for the baboons and maacques were small and empty concrete cells.

<a name="DDE_LINK2"></a> I was supposed to be meeting Jess after she finished work, and it was roughly two hours back to Suzhou, so at 4.30pm I left the zoo and took the two subways back to the train station where I couldn't find the ticket office for quite a while (it is not in the station, it is for some reason on the opposite side of the street and you have to go through a pedestrian underpass to get to it). Once I got to the office I discovered that the only available train was not until 9.30pm, and it was the slow train! I got back to Suzhou at 10.20pm and found that the bus I needed had stopped running for the night. I spent a lot of time trying to find where the taxis parked (rebuffing the touts who wanted five times the real fare) until eventually discovering that they were all in an underground taxi court entered from within the train station (and I had of course been wandering around outside!). Being China, the line for the taxis was at least a hundred people long. I'm the kind of person who can be pretty obstinate, so quite often I will choose to stand in line for half an hour rather than give in to paying way too much for an unofficial taxi, even if the actual amount of money is reasonably small. It is the principle (some call it stupidity). So that is what I did. I didn't get back to where I was staying until 11.30pm! And all just because I wanted to go to the zoo....

A couple of days later I went to the Suzhou Zoo. I was expecting to be there most of the day but I was only there for about an hour. It turned out to not be a very good zoo after all, and it was only small. The reason I had gone was to see the Yangtze softshell turtles which are housed there, which I did succeed in seeing. There are two of the turtles at the zoo, and that is half of the world's entire population of the species. They are within a hair's-breadth of becoming extinct. They are trying to breed the pair at the zoo but the male is believed to be over 100 years old and all the eggs laid so far have been infertile. The turtles have two pretty large ponds, surrounded by glass walls to stop people throwing things into the water, but almost every other animal there is housed appallingly badly. Little barred concrete cells. The bear cages are literally the worst I have ever seen, and bears almost always get screwed over by zoos so I have seen some bad ones before. The zoo was packed because it is a holiday but, to their credit, all the visitors were very well behaved, except for every animal there getting food thrown to it.

Over the last week I have seen some incidental birds around about, but I have only done one day of “real” birding, and that was with a local birder called Kevin (from Birdforum) who about a month ago had offered to show me some birds. He had not anticipated the Israel Effect – it's like the Lynx Effect, but instead of the birds being attracted to me, they are actively repelled. Where I am, the birds are not. My birding luck is so bad that it actually cancels out anybody else's good luck. I do usually end up finding what I'm after, I just have to work twice as hard to get there! (But there-in lies the game).

Because we needed an early start Jess and I were aiming to get to Shanghai from Suzhou at around 6 or 6.30am. I very wisely had gone to the station the day before to get the tickets. I said to the ticket lady that I needed to be in Shanghai by 6am. She tapped some computer keys and said “this is the only train,” swivelling the screen to show me. It got into Shanghai at 7.30am.

“That's the earliest one?!” I asked, a bit incredulously because I knew the trains ran very regularly between Suzhou and Shanghai from very early in the morning.

“Yes,” she said.

“There are no earlier ones at all?”

“Hmmm...” She tapped a few more keys. “Well, there are these ones...” Like, only a lot of earlier ones!

I chose the earliest one, which would get us into Shanghai at 5.45am (followed by 45 minutes on the subway from the Shanghai station to the Hongqiao station where Kevin was meeting us, because the first train from Suzhou direct to Hongqiao didn't get in until 8.45am). Of course, this train meant we had to be at the Suzhou station at 4.30am. Jess was not very impressed by this but she hasn't been able to do any birding at all since coming to China months ago so she didn't complain too much. I also bought some return tickets for the evening. It turned out I needn't have bothered with those ones......

The way the day was going to go should have been obvious when our train in the morning was an hour late; we didn't get to Hongqiao until 7.30am. The Hongqiao train station is quite large. And when I say “quite” I mean “freaking”. Jess and I got lost briefly trying to find our way from the train to the car park, then we found Kevin but lost the car (interestingly enough the different parking levels seem to be identically numbered.....this level P10, next level, P10 again.....not confusing at all!!). Anyway, soon we were on our way. Our destination was Xiao Yang Shan, an island which acts as a migrant trap at this time of year (for once I'm somewhere at the right time of year! Yay!). It is accessed across the world's second longest bridge. I might have got these names a bit muddled but the first spot we were going to is known to the local birders as the Magic Rubbish Dump, the next as the Magic Valley, then back across the bridge to Magic Grasslands and lastly Magic Car Park. The names need to be changed now that I have been there and broken them all.

Birding of course is all ups and downs. A spot that is fantastic one day can be empty the next, especially when migrants are concerned. Today was one of those “down” days, apparently not helped by the wind and lack of recent rains. I don't complain too much though; all birds are good birds to me. The first bird at the first stop (apart for the Chinese bulbuls) was a yellow-browed bunting which was a lifer for me and I never complain about lifers! Everything was really dry but zipping through the scrubby trees were lots of Asian brown flycatchers and female/juvenile blue and white flycatchers. Almost every bird we saw was one of those two species. Not finding much else in the trees we walked on around the path to see if anything was around the corner. There was not, so we went back to the trees. Jess had been distracted by the ground because she's blonde, so we left her there and carried on trying to bird. There's a little garden plot by some shacks and we had some good luck there, with a red-flanked bluetail and a Swinhoe's (rufous-tailed) robin both bouncing around picking up insects. A scaly thrush came barrelling past as well. Being from New Zealand, I'm most used to song thrushes and European blackbirds; something like a scaly thrush looks huge to me! So not a lot of birds around but four of them were lifers and they were all really nice lifers as well which is even better! Jess reappeared carrying an armful of rocks and looking very pleased with herself. She had lost her binoculars through a complicated series of events (really nice binoculars too, with an image stabiliser inside so she can use them on boats) and she doesn't like mine too much because I've dropped them a few times and so they aren't as good as hers, and so today she decided to concentrate on rocks instead because it is hard to bird properly without your own pair of binoculars. The good thing with rocks of course is that they don't fly away.

Not far from the Magic Rubbish Dump is Magic Valley. There is a massive container port there which stretches for a kilometre. That's not what we were there for though. Once again the trees had quite a lot of birds in them, it's just that they were almost all Asian brown flycatchers! One of the blue and white flycatchers here was a male though, absolutely stunning bird! There were also a couple of grey-streaked flycatchers, some great tits and a couple of female Siberian blue robins. A pair of striated herons in a tree were confusing at first because we couldn't see what they were, just that they were big and dark. A kestrel gave me some good views, and another (or the same) male blue and white flycatcher posed nicely in an exposed tree. I was hoping for a grey nightjar which get seen here, but no luck with that.

So.... with not much happening around the place we moved onwards (or backwards, seeing we went back across the bridge) to the Magic Grasslands where there should have been waders in the ponds. The refrain of the day so far had been “where have all the birds gone?” which now got modified slightly to “where have all the waders gone?” (Much hilarity ensued later for Jess when we arrived at some reed beds and a whole lot of egrets and redshanks just up and left, simpy because I had arrived). We did see a far-eastern curlew on the mudflats, and there were loads of little egrets, grey herons, and some great egrets as well, but that was it. Oh, Richard's pipits too on the way. I do like pipits and Richard's are a lifer for me since they split them from the New Zealand pipit. We kept going towards the Magic Car Park, which is at the Holiday Inn; the trees in the car park are where anything interesting in the area will turn up at dusk to roost. There are also supposed to be Siberian weasels living there which would have been the best bird of the day if we had managed to see them! We stopped a few times en route to the Holiday Inn to check out the reed beds (that's where we saw the flock of spotted redshanks and a little ringed plover) and on one of those stops the car decided enough was enough, it wanted to get in on the birding derailment action as well, and it just stopped dead. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about cars, so all I can say is that it wouldn't start again, for pretty much no reason at all.

Having called to arrange for a breakdown company, we set out walking towards the Holiday Inn which was a couple of kilometres up the road. The intention for the end of day had been to go to an area of reedbeds with a boardwalk 5km further on from the Holiday Inn to find reed parrotbills (that's probably where all the waders had absconded to as well) but it was too late to walk that far. On the way to the Holiday Inn we saw a little grebe and a whole bunch of coots (which are Jess' favourite bird for some reason), as well as one or maybe two blue rock thrushes. At the Magic Car Park the distinct lack of magic remained. No birds, no weasels.

We waited in the reception of the Holiday Inn for the vehicle to arrive from the breakdown company, and then got driven back to where Kevin's car was. Then we waited some more (and some more, and some more...) for the actual tow-truck to arrive. The train tickets I had for the trip back to Suzhou were for 8.45pm, but they were going to be useless now. While we waited Jess checked the train schedules on her phone. She had to be back in Suzhou that night, so we couldn't just stay in Shanghai unfortunately, because that would have been much easier! There were trains up until 11.40pm so I wasn't too worried, but when the tow-truck arrived it sort of seemed like that would become a problem because (as far as I understood) their company wouldn't let them take us that far into the city to the train station. They could take the driver (i.e. Kevin) all the way home with the car – practically next to the train station we wanted – but not the other two of us! I think it must have been an hour between the tow-truck getting there and us actually leaving, but eventually we settled on a compromise where they would take Jess and I to the nearest subway station and then we could make our own way to the train station.

We got dropped off at a subway station at 10pm, and got to the train station at 11pm. Fortunately I knew exactly where the ticket office was in relation to the station from having been there the other day so that saved us any confusion. I had been hoping that there wouldn't be many people there, it being so late, but when we got into the ticket office there were only three lines open, and all three had long queues. I looked at my watch, 11.15pm, the queues were at least half an hour long, the last train was at 11.40pm. It was either the train or a 500 Yuan taxi. Just this once I dropped the patient Westerner routine and went Chinese. I didn't go full Chinese, I didn't push or shove or elbow or kick or punch or stab anyone, I just strode right up to the front of the line and stepped in front of the first person. It was the first step in my downward slide to becoming a local. We got to the boarding gate with a few minutes to spare, arrived back into Suzhou at 12.50am the next morning, got a taxi with no queues (well, it was 1am!), and back to the hostel at 1.30am. Another birding day completed.

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