Hong Kong Buntings

Hong Kong has a large number of species of bunting (Emberizidae) during the winter and as passage migrants in spring and autumn. They vary from being common in their range to being classified as ‘critically endangered’ by the IUCN Red List. AJP photographed the following—which cover that range—during the early spring this year.

Yellow-breasted Bunting, Emberiza aureola. Classified as ‘critically endangered’ because it is trapped in huge numbers in China for human consumption. The French feast on the Ortolan Bunting (E. hortulana); the Chinese on this species. The Hong Kong bird book has it down as a scarce passage migrant with a only a few being seen in spring and autumn. Found across a broad band from northern Europe to the eastern edge of Asia it overwinters in south-east Asia.

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Little Bunting, Emberiza pusillanimous. Winters in southern and eastern China. A common winter visitor in Hong Kong as well as being very common on passage in spring.

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Yellow-browed Bunting, Emberiza chrysophus. A rare winter visitor and passage migrant in Hong Kong.

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Tristram’s Bunting, Emberiza tristrami. Uncommon winter visitor in Hong Kong (it winters in south China).

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Black-faced Bunting, Emberiza spodocephala. Common winter visitor and passage migrant in Hong Kong.

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The buntings are seed-eaters. And with that statement their mode-of-life is dismissed by birdwatchers, bird list tickers and the classical but still very much alive ornithologists. I will return to seed-eating birds in a later post. In the meantime here is the gone-to-seed cabbage plants the Little and Yellow-browed bunting flock were feeding on.

Desert Journal by Raymond Bridgman Cowles. A good read from 1977

I have enjoyed reading Desert Journal. Reflections of a Naturalist which was written by Raymond Cowles (1896-1975) and published shortly after his death. It has been on my ‘to read’ pile for a couple of years. I have written before about Cowles and his pioneering work on behavioural thermoregulation in desert reptiles which was done from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s in California. I learnt a great deal about the Californian desert and its inhabitants and of how he became an ardent promoter of conservation caused by growth of the human population.

I now know how his interest in the desert was piqued:

My first experience with the desert, its plant and animal residents, its storms, and its high, summer-long temperatures, came when money for a college education was necessary and desert salaries for labor were twice those elsewhere. This economic reality led me to volunteer for work with one of the Imperial Valley irrigation districts.

The district camp to which I was assigned was on the so-called high-line canal, a half mile from the bridge connecting the Imperial Valley with some of the most spectacular sand dunes in the country. The accommodations were crude in the extreme —a clapboard-sided shack with a canvas roof, open-screened sides, and a brush-covered porch. A floor that supported the frame rested on a few bricks. They held the structure some six inches off the ground and provided an ideal shelter for sidewinders, black widow spiders, sun spiders, and various other interesting creatures of the desert.

The camp was lonely and remote, and my major task was to patrol a five-mile stretch of canal bank daily to see that there were no breaks or flooding that might drown and heavily alka-lize good farmland. As muskrats were the commonest source of canal damage, we were urged to shoot them as well as the occasional Colorado River beaver that attempted to establish homesites along the canal sides. This was back in 1917 when some of the old-time "bad men" and their victims (those who survived various shooting affairs) were still living. Being near the Mexican border and close to a continuous flow of water that led deep into California, our shack was on a natural approach or escape route for bandits of any nationality.

The sides of the cabin were full of holes, souvenirs left by two escaping criminals when they temporarily sought shelter in it. Under cover of darkness they fled into the desert, from which they could strike back toward the canal for water if necessary. They made the break across the border into Mexico and presumed safety. On another occasion a group of desperados held up a store or two in Niland, killing one owner. They, too, followed the canal in their escape through the desert. The life line of water made these attempts possible.

Those were the days of the old plank road, a movable highway of railroad ties that provided traction across the drifting sand dunes to the east. Although it was inadvisable to use the route during the summer heat, not a few reckless motorists attempted it. Every hot season a number of cars broke down, and their passengers had to walk to the nearest water, which was the high-line canal. I soon discovered the impersonal ruthlessness of the desert climate from my experiences in rescuing those left in marooned cars while the driver sought water and help. Some made it to safety, but we were often the first to learn of impending disaster. We contacted farmers, brought horses to tow the cars to hard ground, and stayed until the cars started or we could bring their occupants to a supply of water.

Three people died in an attempt to reach help during the two summers I spent on this job…

Cowles RB. 1977. Desert Journal. Reflections of a Naturalist. Berkeley: University of California Press

Common Asian Toads: a February start to breeding in Hong Kong

February is the start of the breeding season for the commonest amphibian in Hong Kong, the Common Asian Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus. AP found adults and spawn in Tai Po Kau reserve doing what the book says they do: laying strings of eggs wrapped around vegetation or rocks.

Other frogs and toads in Hong Kong start breeding later in the year, coinciding with the start of the spring rains. Clearly, the trigger to breed is different but what those triggers are in any one species, let along a number living in the same place, has not been sorted out. A fertile search field (excuse the pun) still awaits.

Cauca Guan. What a corker!

 

Cauca Guan

Cauca Guans (Penelope perspicax) were common as we drove and walked along the road through the Otún Quimbaya Fauna and Flora Sanctuary in Colombia last November. Their less than elegant scramblings along the branches with occasional trips to the ground can easily be spotted. Above them in the trees were Red-ruffed Fruitcrows (Pyroderus scutatus), a dull name for a cotinga, which seemed determined to avoid being photographed.

The Cauca Guan is exactly what its name says it is: a guan found in the Cauca Valley. Classified as ‘Endangered’ by the IUCN Red List until a few years ago, it is now in the ‘Vulnerable’ category. Only 40 years ago it was thought to have become extinct. The forests have been fragmented over the years but in the small areas the guan does occur the population is dense and it can easily be found.

The track through Otún Quimbaya Reserve

Turtles or Terrapins - a surprising usage

For common names in chelonians we have a situation in that a common name used in the USA. a bastardised version of an Algonqiuin word, came back to Britain, while that term was then largely dropped in the USA except for a small number of species that live in brackish water. The word of course is ’terrapin’. Every schoolboy of my day knew that tortoises live on land, terrapins in or around freshwater and turtles in the sea. Modern American usage is to group three groups into two: turtles and tortoises.

The term ‘turtle’ for all aquatic and semi-aquatic chelonians seems to becoming universal in English-speaking countries. The adoption of American usage in Britain dates from the introduction of vast numbers of captive hatched ‘turtles’ (mainly red-eared) from ‘turtle farms’ in the southern USA from the late 1950s and then of course the ‘mutant ninja turtles’ appeared on screen.

There has though always been great variation and inconsistency. Thus in English usage we have ‘pond tortoise’ and ‘water tortoise’ often used instead of ‘terrapin’. And fully-aquatic chelonians like the softshells and the matamata were often called turtles rather than terrapins. In the USA freshwater turtles have other names like ‘slider’ and ‘cooter’ while they have ‘box turtle’ and ‘box tortoise’.

With the apparently clear divide divide between American and British usage I was very surprised to see ‘terrapin’ used by Raymond Bridgman Cowles (1896-1975) in his autobiographical Desert Journal published in 1977 after his death.  He wrote:

The little aquatic terrapins may, however, void excrement containing Salmonella. (p 176)

Cowles was born in Natal to American missionary (and part-time animal collecting) parents but soon moved to the USA. The question is how common was the word ‘terrapin’ in the USA of Cowles’s day? In that respect I am reminded of a conversation at a conference in the USA in 1973. My colleague, born in 1921, who had worked for  short time as a veterinary surgeon in England, and an American dairy scientist realised that obsolete terms used on farms in England and New England were the same. I wish I could remember what they were. In that vein, was ‘terrapin’ alive in well in the country areas for longer than we thought?

As for me I still cannot say ‘Red-eared Turtle’ without a visible shudder.

This pile of chelonians in Portugal comprises introduced North American and native species

Cowles RB. 1977. Desert Journal. Reflections of a Naturalist. Berkeley: University of California Press

What on earth is a Sumpah-Sumpah?

In recent articles I described the activities of Alfred St Alban Smith who sent a large number of animals, particularly reptiles, from south-east Asia to London Zoo between 1927 and 1936. The Annual Reports of ZSL listed them all the species by common name. But some of those common names are not ones we may recognise nearly 100 years later. One was Sumpah-Sumpah. I had no idea what a sumpah-sumpah is. Some digging found it on a 2005 Malaysian postage stamp, one of four is a set of ‘rare reptiles’.

The Sumpah-Sumpah is Gonocephalus grandis which goes under three common names in English: Giant Forest Dragon; Great Anglehead Lizard; Malayan Crested Lizard. They are mainly arboreal, living along forest streams of peninsular Malaya including Singapore, Sumatra and nearby islands, and Borneo. They are agamids, as one would expect from the distribution, but are sometimes in the Malay region called chameleons which just adds to any confusion. The IUCN has them classified as of ‘least concern’.

Giant Forest Dragon. Brinchang, Cameron Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia
By Bernard Dupont 2013

Hong Kong: Indochinese Yuhina

AJP spotted this bird in the New Territories at the end of winter there. In our time in 1960s Hong Kong it would have caused a sensation amongst the birdwatchers for the simple reason it remained unrecorded there for at least another two decades.

The latest Field Guide to the Birds of Hong Kong and South China (9th edition, 2022) describes it as “mostly an irruptive and uncommon winter visitor increasing, scarce and localised in summer’.

This bird is just one example of the vastly increased number of birds and reptiles now known to occur in Hong Kong compared with 60 years ago. The question then has to be asked: was it an erratic winter visitor to Hong Kong in the decades it was not recorded or was it simply not being seen by the relatively small number of birdwatchers?

When it first appeared in Hong Kong it was known as the Striated Yuhina (Yuhina castaniceps torqueola). That species was split comparatively recently with torqueola being re-raised to a species proper, as Robert Swinhoe described it in 1870. In 2019, as a result of a wide-ranging phylogenetic analysis both species were lifted from the genus Yuhina and placed in the genus Staphida.

Staphia torqueola now has the common name of Indochinese Yuhina. The species occurs from south and south-east China to north Indochina; it reaches  its southerly limit around Danang in Vietnam.