A worrying note for China's bulbul songbirds
Ornithologist Xing Xiaoying has painstakingly captured bulbuls' music, but hears a worrying pattern as climate change pushes the birds north
With soft steps, careful not to rustle any leaves or crack the twigs strewn about before her, Xing Xiaoying pursues the Light-vented Bulbul songbird and takes aim with her long, camouflaged microphone. This ornithologist is on the hunt for music.
Over the last couple of years, Xing has recorded more than 4,000 songs from the southern songbirds that have migrated north in China, likely because of climate change. But her research has shown that the birds' migration seems to have come at the cost of complexity and variance in their songs.
The PhD student of ornithology with the Chinese Academy of Sciences talks about her discovery, which was published last month in the British-based Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The Light-vented Bulbul is typically a southerner [in China]. Its body and wings are structurally unsuitable for long flights. They like to use thick bushes and heavy foliage to find food, nest, play and rest. They don't have much of a spirit for adventure, either - they rarely visit hilltops more than a couple of hundred metres high. They had long lived closely to human settlements to the south of the Yangtze River and built up large colonies in almost every southern province. They're so chatty and sing so loudly that the bird [also known as the Chinese bulbul] can hardly escape the ear of a birdwatcher.
The first sightings of the bulbuls in northern China were reported in the 1930s, but they remained rare until the 1990s. Now sightings are reported all over the place, stretching [nearly 2,000 kilometres] from Xian [in Shaanxi province) to Dalian (in Shandong province). Their songs can even be heard now throughout the year in Shenyang [in Liaoning province].