TAIYUAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Spring is in the air. Tens of thousands of swans are leaving their winter homes in China and flying back to Siberia in droves.
Local authorities in China's regions along the swans' migration route have pledged harsh punishment on poaching and arranged special personnel to safeguard the birds on their return to Siberia.
Swans are listed as a national second-level protected animal in China and a globally vulnerable species. According to Zhang Longsheng, a senior engineer with the Shanxi provincial forestry and grassland bureau, there are three main migration routes for Siberian swans flying to China, with the middle route passing through Mongolia to northern and central China.
"Over 20,000 swans migrate from Siberia to China for winter annually. The Yellow River Wetland is their largest migration site, attracting more than half the population every winter," Zhang said.
Located between Pinglu County of Shanxi Province, and the city of Sanmenxia in Henan Province, the Yellow River Wetland has an area of 2.8 million hectares, playing an important role in protecting water sources and purifying water quality in northern China.
"Swans started to hibernate here since the 1980s, and the number has grown from 2,000 to 12,000 over the past years," said Yang Yunge, head of the wildlife conservation station of Pinglu.
In 2012, Pinglu was named "China's Swan County" by the China Wildlife Conservation Association. In order to protect the species, Pinglu has shut down all polluting enterprises around the wetland, invested tens of millions of U.S. dollars to improve the environment and established a conservation team with some 100 people as well as installed a video surveillance system.
"It is our responsibility to protect these swans. They are both part of the natural ecology and our happy life," said He Jianxi, who has been a ranger for more than 10 years in the Pinglu Yellow River Wetland Reserve. For the past few months, he has been feeding them corn and cabbage weighing over 100 tonnes.
For the past six consecutive years, Pinglu compensated 400,000 yuan (about 57,100 U.S. dollars) annually for local farmers to return farmland to wetland.
Pinglu strives to find a "balance point" between ecological and economic benefits. The county is constructing a swan ecological economic demonstration zone with an investment of 3 billion yuan. After the completion of its first stage, it is expected to receive more than 500,000 tourists a year.
The rise of the "swan economy" has strengthened the awareness of authorities and people across China to protect the species and the ecological environment.
In 2014, Sanmenxia has designated November 22 as "Swans Protection Day."
Last winter, an international academic exchange conference on swan conservation was held in the city of Rongcheng in east China's Shandong Province, another important swan migration site.
Representatives and scholars from China, Russia, Japan and other countries jointly issued the Rongcheng Declaration on Swans Conservation, aimed at strengthening international cooperation in the protection of swans.
Guo Lixin, deputy secretary-general of the China Wildlife Conservation Association, said at the meeting that Rongcheng's swan protection and management model based on community participation has formed an urban ecology in which people and nature harmoniously coexist.
In 2013, China set a "red line" of no less than about 53 million hectares of wetlands by 2020. In 2019, 158 pilot national wetland parks in China passed appraisal, according to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
Thanks to the introduction of multiple protection policies and increasing financial investment, China's continuous improvement of the ecological environment has become the best "escort" for the migration of swans.
"A place with a good ecological environment is the best habitat for swans. As China continues to improve its ecological environment, there may be more swans flying from Siberia to spend the winter in China," Zhang said.
