Nearly extinct Tundra swans flock back to Chongming
Shanghai's Chongming Dongtan National Natural Reserve has recorded the presence of 2,900 Tundra swans, a breed that was nearly extinct in the city, the most in the past two decades.
On Thursday, the World Wetland Day, a campaign themed "Restore Wetland Homes" claimed that the number of Tundra swans at Dongtan reached 2,900 this winter, close to the peak in the 1980s.
Wild birds at Shanghai Chongming Dongtan National Natural Reserve
The campaign was organized in collaboration with the Shanghai Natural History Museum and the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, which also collaborated for a year to develop the board game "Wetland Survival Rules."
This card game, which teaches players about various types of wetlands and the creatures that inhabit them, was also released on Thursday.
According to Sun Xiaohong with the city's office of ecology and environment, the wetland area in Shanghai is 465,500 hectares, which includes two globally significant wetlands, Chongming Dongtan and the Yangtze River Estuary Chinese Sturgeon Wetland.
The board game "Wetland Survival Rules"
The city also has two national nature reserves, two provincial wetlands, two national wetland parks and 13 city-level wetlands.
In the 1980s, around 3,000 Tundra swans spent the winter here. However, due to the invasion of alien species such as Spartina alterniflora in the 1990s, the number of Tundra swans decreased from thousands to hundreds.
At the turn of the century, only a few dozens of Tundra swans visited Dongtan in the winter. And even they vanished for a while.
According to a local government guideline on further strengthening biodiversity protection issued last year, the wetland protection rate in Shanghai will remain above 50 percent by 2025.
