KASHGAR: For bird-watching enthusiast Guo Dandan, volunteering to guide students on a birding excursion at Beihu Lake in Kashgar city in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region left an indelible mark on her.
Hailing from Zhengzhou in Henan province, Guo had yet to visit Kashgar for bird-watching, making her participation in the Kashgar Bird-watching Race, part of the "2026 Shenzhen-Kashgar Cultural Exchange Season: Journey of Mountains and Seas", a truly cherished opportunity. The initiative was supported by the Shenzhen Aid-Xinjiang Forward Command Post.
Arriving in the city on the morning of Sept 24, Guo decided to join the Beihu tour that afternoon. "I want to have more time to get familiar with the birds here," she said. "Identifying local species in the wild will be quite a challenge, and I want to be prepared."
That afternoon, she led a group of five local students on a bird-watching outing at the park, successfully identifying and recording a dozen bird species common to the area.
On Sept 25, Guo and her three teammates embarked on the five-day bird race organised by the Rosefinch Center, a national non-profit dedicated to promoting bird-watching and conservation.
By the afternoon of Sept 28, the team had returned to the park in downtown Kashgar.
"It was the fourth day of the race. We had already birded intensively from Kashgar to Tashkurgan Tajik autonomous county for three days and managed to record nearly 100 species," said Guo, who began bird-watching in 2018. "We wanted to add a few common species we hadn't seen at other sites."
Team member Ma Guofei wandered to a secluded corner of the lake and noticed a solitary bird drifting on the water. Initially, he thought it was a black-necked grebe. However, upon closer inspection through his binoculars, he noticed a significant difference.
"The colour of its neck was a dark red, not black as I initially thought," Ma said. "I thought it might be a red-necked grebe."
Ma had never seen a red-necked grebe before, a species much rarer than the black-necked grebe in China. "The red-necked grebe was the top bird at a bird race around Qinghai Lake in 2025," said Ma, who works as a ranger at the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve in Hubei province. "Unfortunately, I was one of the few participants who missed seeing it during that race."
To confirm his sighting, Ma called his teammates over, who promptly verified it. Their discovery marked the first recorded sighting of a red-necked grebe in Kashgar, and possibly in southern Xinjiang, earning it the title of the top bird of the race.
"That's the charm of bird-watching," Ma said. "You never know when you'll be rewarded with the discovery of a rarity."
With high hopes for discoveries like the red-necked grebe, eight teams comprising 32 participants from 19 provincial-level regions took part in the race.
It was not only the first bird-watching competition held in Xinjiang, but also the longest, farthest and highest-altitude bird-watching event, with the greatest elevation difference among simultaneous bird races in the country. Having kicked off on Sept 25 at 8.30am and concluded on Sept 29 at 8.30pm, the race spanned 108 hours over five calendar days.
Before the teams set out from their hotel in Kashgar, Zhong Jia, co-founder of the Rosefinch Center, instructed each team to record the distance travelled throughout the competition. After the race concluded on Sept 29, the teams submitted their distances to the organisers. "The shortest distance recorded was 1,257 kilometres," Zhong told China Daily.
"The longest was 1,672 kilometres, which was logged by the winning team. This was no coincidence."
Wu Zongkai, a 63-year-old from Yan'an in Shaanxi province, partnered with three of his bird-watching friends for the race. "Our team's average age is 62," he said. Aware that his teammate, 60-year-old Liu Zhiqing, also from Yan'an, was particularly sensitive to altitude changes, Wu packed an oxygen concentrator for their trip to Kashgar.
Upon reaching the county town of Tashkurgan, situated at an elevation of 3,100 metres above sea level, two team members, Liu in particular, experienced altitude sickness and had difficulty sleeping at night.
"In Tashkurgan, we used oxygen for seven to eight hours a day," Liu said. "It helped somewhat, but the relief was limited."
Despite these challenges, the team persisted in its bird-watching efforts. "We drove over 1,500 kilometres during the race, visiting most sites at elevations above 4,000 metres," Liu said. Remarkably, they managed to record more than 90 bird species, including one that was not recorded by the other teams.
At the closing ceremony of the race on Sept 30, Zhong said the competition was a demanding test of bird identification skills, physical endurance, driving expertise, field research acumen and teamwork.
The route, stretching from Kashgar to Tashkurgan, spanned vast distances and dramatic altitudes, reaching up to 4,733 metres.
"Our participants had transformed the event into a comprehensive field survey rather than a conventional race," she said.
The bird-watchers explored different routes to maximise coverage and data collection. This approach mirrored a large-scale field survey, offering insights into the region's avian diversity, Zhong said.
The competition recorded an impressive 180 bird species across 17 orders and 47 families, including nine national first-class protected species such as the white-headed duck, black-necked crane, black stork and glossy ibis, and 23 national second-class protected species such as the red-necked grebe and common crane. The winning team recorded 123 species.
The diversity highlighted the rich habitats of the Kashgar region and provided bird enthusiasts with confidence in the area's avian richness.
Of the 180 species observed, 21 were recorded by a single team. "When a team discovers a rare bird, it often draws other teams to the site on subsequent days," Zhong said. "While they often failed to spot the target bird, they would encounter other unexpected species. This is likely due to the vastness of sites in Xinjiang and the transient nature of birds during the autumn migration season, as many species don't linger in one place for long."
After the closing ceremony, some participants headed to Beihu Park, hoping to capture better photographs of the red-necked grebe. Unfortunately, the bird was no longer there. - China Daily/ANN
