Publication
Spring migration work in Napu for 2025 (update1)
Let’s start with some thanks to people for making the 18th year of GFN scanning at Nanpu happen. As usual, Beijing Normal University via Prof. Zhengwang Zhang and Dr Weipan Lei for support and administra ve work to enable our presence at Nanpu. Wetlands Interna onal’s Flyway Bo leneck Yellow Sea Project for their financial support. Our colleagues Yang Liu and Junfeng Liu for help with organising the accommoda on and local logis cs and Yang Liu is part of our 3-person scanning team. The first impressions we have is that ‘things are the same’. Of course, there are some small differences but what we have seen so far, in our first days, is that not too much has changed. And that is a good thing for the birds. We recorded the highest bird numbers on the Nanpu mudflat late yesterday evening, to coincide with World Migratory Birds Day. We watched the spectacle of around 40,000 birds sweeping over the wall from the ponds, mostly in three huge flocks over about 15 minutes. When we roughly counted the birds on the mud there were 50,500. A considerable increase from the previous days. As ever it is difficult to pin down if this is a huge sudden increase, although that is perfectly likely, or because we were at the seawall in the evening when we are usually there very early in the morning. In the mornings the birds have been coming to the mud steadily over an hour or more, not like the spectacular se ng yesterday evening.Possibly half the birds were Red Knots.