Salt glands and Sea Water: Duck Farming in 1960s Hong Kong and a Giant Petrel in Argentina

Salt-glands enable many birds to drink saline waters and eat salt-rich invertebrate foods. A question that arises is the extent to which the salt gland is used in birds that can fly or swim to a source of fresh water to drink. Do they just stay in salt water and get rid of the salt through the salt glands, or do they, if possible, go to fresh water to drink? Salt glands—just like man-made desalination plants—need a great deal of energy to run, so one might predict that birds with salt glands would, if they could, drink fresh water. There could be a trade-off, of course, between using energy to fly or swim to fresh water and using energy to stay put with the salt glands working.

Several weeks ago I wrote about an article by V.C. Wynne-Edwards in a magazine of the 1930s—before the discovery of salt glands in the 1950s. He had found that gulls do not, in general, stray too far from a source of fresh water and suggested that they only drink there.

The first actual observation I heard of was in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Domestic ducks and geese have salt glands and given salty water to drink can switch them on in a matter of minutes. They cannot, however, unlike truly marine birds, survive on full-strength sea water for any length of time.The late John Phillips (1933-87) was appointed Professor of Zoology at the University of Kong Kong in 1962 at the age of 29 . He had previously worked on salt glands for a while and soon after his arrival in Hong Kong had been driving through the New Territories when he saw a large flock of domestic ducks dabbling for food on salt flats near Yuen Long. He thought the salt glands must have been well and truly working in those birds. That may indeed have been the case, temporarily at least, since although mechanical arrangements in the beak can reduce the ingestion of water along with food, the ducks must have been taking in some water nearly as salty as sea water. However, as he continued watching the farmer appeared and herded the ducks back to his land. The ducks ran onto the farm and headed straight for a container of fresh water which they drank avidly.

I had been planning to write this article but lacked a photograph of a flock of domestic ducks in Hong Kong. Then Rob Taylor posted this photograph in a Facebook Group on Hong Kong in the 1960s; I show it here with his approval. The ducks appear to be sitting on the bank of a gei wai—an artificial salt water pond filled by the waters of the Pearl River estuary and used for rearing salt-water shrimps.

Domestic ducks- New Territories, Hong Kong.
Photograph from Rob Taylor's family collection

I saw something similar in in a very different setting with a very different species. New to the birds of the southern ocean, I was keeping my eye on a Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus) as we walked along the shore in Ushuaia in southern Argentina. The wind was icy and as I pulled a scarf around my mouth—I had raging toothache—I noticed the petrel moving close inshore. It made for a drain from which fresh water after a heavy shower was flowing into the sea. The bird had a long drink from the drain and headed paddled off to sea. 

Thus in both the domestic ducks and the petrel, fresh water would have diluted any excess salt in the body and enabled excretion of dilute urine through the kidneys rather than concentrated salt from the salt glands.

These observations on birds drinking fresh water in preference to salt water accord with experiments that have been done. Most birds tested—even a number that have salt glands—prefer fresh water to salt water when offered a choice. A possible exception is an albatross that is truly oceanic.

Giant Salamanders; Would You Believe They Common Imports into Britain before World War II?

Giant Salamanders have been in the news in the past week. Chinese Giant Salamanders were confiscated by customs and sent to London Zoo. I have not been able to find out whether the salamanders were brought into the country destined for the restaurant trade or to be kept in a public or private animal collection.

I have written about these salamanders before and their being so commonly available that in Hong Kong in the 1960s that they were used for class dissection. All the ones that arrived were about 35 cm long, like the one at London Zoo, and only a sixth of their maximum length. That seems to be about the size favoured by restaurants in China.

Chinese Giant Salamander. Hong Kong 1967
On the roof of the Northcote Science Building

Giant Salamanders are on the menu in China as ‘the fish that walks’. They are bred on a commercial scale but there seems no doubt that wild-caught, i.e. poached, individuals make up a large proportion of those sold. Numbers have fallen massively in the past decades—80% since the 1950s is the current estimate and the species is now classed as Critically Endangered because not only is it a food item worth real money at the luxury end of the market but habitats have been and are being wiped out or ravaged as human habitation expands.

What is not generally known is that giant salamanders were imported into Britain for the amateur herpetologist trade in the 1930s. I found this article in Water Life magazine of 27 September 1938:

September is a good time to review the happenings of the closing season, which has been interesting for several reasons, and to make one’s plans for the winter. First as regards supply. A wealth of species has been imported, among them…Megalobatrachus [the generic name for giant salamanders used for decades before it was decided Andrias had priority]… 

The demand for the Gigantic Salamander must surely now be filled. No less than three of our dealers have had these animals during the last year or two, and a fourth told me recently he is hoping to arrange a consignment at any time now. Considering how commonly these animals are met with in Japan and parts of China, their price remains disappointingly high over here. Since most of the continental zoos and aquaria number their specimens by the half-dozen or more, it is remarkable that the breeding of the species at Amsterdam seventy-odd years ago has never been emulated.

The author did not distinguish between Chinese (Andrias davidianus) and Japanese Giant Salamanders (A. japonicus). Given their once common occurrence in the live-food trade in China, including Hong Kong, my guess is that those imported in the 1930s were from China.

It is also known that giant salamanders (often called Gigantic Salamanders, as above) were imported by European dealers for zoos and for amateur herpetologists in the later decades of the 19th Century. Thus the Reverend Gregory Bateman in his famous book, The Vivarium, published 1897, not only wrote what was then known of these animals but this:

These huge Salamanders may, from time to time, be bought of the larger dealers in wild animals, at prices, according to size, which range from £10 downwards. 

£10 then would be £1000 now (calculated on increase in retail prices). There were some very wealthy amateur herpetologists around in the years before the First World War.

The giant salamanders imported into Europe must have been pretty tough, having survived a long sea voyage through the tropics. Indeed, what struck me about the ones we handled in Hong Kong was how unfazed they were by high temperatures; not at all what might be expected from inhabitants of rocky streams flowing from mountains. Equally, my wife, who did the wrangling (well, somebody had to carry the camera) was surprised by how willing they were to snap at a passing finger or hand.

Finally, I do not know the identity of the author—a prolific and knowledgeable writer on reptiles and amphibians in the 1930s—who wrote under the non-de-plume ‘Amphibius’. It is known that he died between 1939 and about 1950. I have written about him and my search here. I would be most grateful to hear from anybody with more information.

Protein deficiency in early life. Experiments from 1960s Hong Kong

When I was writing the post of 8 March on the classic experiments in malnutrition and the intergenerational effects that ensued, I could not help thinking I was vaguely aware of earlier experiments that also explored the effects of a shortage of protein in the diet on a rat’s ability to navigate. I then realised who was doing it and where but I had no idea of the background or the outcome. It was actually in the next room of the animal house we occupied at the University of Hong Kong (it was air conditioned!) and just getting started on it by the time we left was the new, and first, Professor of Psychology. He was known then as John Dawson. I only spoke to him a couple of times but I had him down as a good guy since he spoke in terms of evolutionary psychology. But what was he doing and why?

I knew for that he was using the colony of rats in the Department of Zoology, an inbred strain founded from animals flown in from the University of Sheffield about eighteen months earlier*. I also knew that the zoology workshop (brilliant with perspex constructions) had built the test maze.

John Binnie-Dawson in 1969
from a family tree on ancestry.com

From the university newsletters that arrived over the years (long discontinued) I realised that the John Dawson we knew was being referred to as Professor J.L.M. Binnie-Dawson. Therefore, in tracking what he did I had to use the two names since I discovered he published under both.

It is clear that he had observed the feminising effect of kwashiorkor, the result of extreme protein deficiency after weaning, on children in West Africa. Dawson had worked in Sierra Leone. From his publications it is also clear that he was interested in differences between the sexes in spatial ability and so the two fields were brought together in studying effect of protein deficiency and sex hormones in rats.

I have not read the papers, having been content to see if my memory was correct but it seems that he pulled the whole story together in a paper in Psychologia in 1984 of which this is the published summary:

The author presents empirical evidence, mainly from his own research conducted from 1963 to 1975, to support the biosocial hypothesis, which argues that the normal sex difference between males and females in spatial ability has a 2-way sex hormone basis. This higher level of male spatial ability is also held to be biologically adaptive for the human group: In subsistence hunting societies, the male must generally be able to hunt food and locate water to ensure the survival of the group. This hypothesis also postulates that the actual level of male spatial ability in a particular biological subsistence environment will be influenced by the spatial requirements of that environment. Three specific studies are reviewed: (1) a study to determine whether Arunta individuals living in the semi-desert environment of Central Australia have developed high spatial ability and a permissive social system, as contrasted with the strict group orientation of West African Temne rice agriculturalists, who do not need spatial ability to grow and accumulate rice; (2) a study of the effects of the Kwashiorkor-induced endocrine dysfunction and feminization of males on the development of feminine spatial ability; and (3) a study using rats to test this suggested endocrine basis of spatial ability under controlled laboratory conditions. It is concluded that these biosocial studies have provided extensive evidence for the biosocial hypothesis.

Other research interest included handedness, as well as a number of other areas in cross-cultural psychology, much of relevance to the people of Hong Kong.

While in Hong Kong, he was instrumental in proposing and then hosting in 1972 the inaugural meeting of what became the International Association fo Cross-Cultural Psychology. He was its first Secretary-General and later its President.

John Lewis Mervyn Binnie was born in 1930 in Sydney. According to genealogy websites the name Dawson was that of his paternal step-grandfather, Edwin Dawson, who adopted him after his father died and shortly before his mother died. This is the name he published under until 1980 when he changed his name to Binnie-Dawson.

Before he arrived in Hong Kong, he published from Edinburgh in the early 1960s where he was Research Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology; it seems it was while based there that he worked in Sierra Leone. He also served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Reserve. Later in the 1960s, he was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sydney. It was from there that he was appointed to the new chair in Hong Kong.

John Binnie-Dawson retired in the mid-1980s to Kingswear in Devon. He died in Torbay Hospital on 29 December 1987, aged 57.

John Binnie-Dawson was one of a small group who during the 1960s lifted the University of Hong Kong from being a largely teaching institution to one recognised internationally in research and scholarship.

…And he was another to demonstrate how important it is to be given a good start in life.

*The rats provided a good source of income for the department under a wheeze devised by John Phillips (1933-1987) (FRS 1981). Excess were preserved in large numbers and charged—in advance—to the ‘A’ level Examinations Board (then run by the University) against their possible use in practical examinations. The charge per rat was not small.

Binnie-Dawson, J. L. [1984]. Bio-Social and Endocrine Bases of Spatial Ability. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient 27: 129-151. 

Ronald Strahan: Zoologist in 1950s Hong Kong

When I was writing about A.J. (‘Jock’) Marshall I found that he had visited Hong Kong in 1957 and that he had some correspondence with a ‘Don?’ there. But who in the University of Hong Kong was Don with a question mark? I eventually realised that it was not a ‘Don’ he was writing to and visiting but ‘Ron’ and that Ron was Ronald Strahan (1922-2010), a fellow Australian, in the Department of Zoology.

From here

Somebody must have mentioned after we arrived in Hong Kong in 1965 that Ron Strahan had been a member of the Department of Zoology but we didn’t realise he had lived in the same block of flats, possibly the same flat, until some months later when we found his old packing cases half filling the cage for such goods allocated to us in a block of university flats. In Hong Kong, unless the subject of a passed-on story of a notorious episode (J.Z. Young’s visit as external examiner, for example, provided several) once you were gone you were gone.

I do not know when Ronald Strahan arrived in Hong Kong (the various obituaries and short autobiography do not help) but he was certainly there in 1954 because Bernard ‘Bunny’ Mellor (1917-1998)—for most of his time between 1946 and 1974 the Registrar—showed in his history of the University a photograph of a pantomime in that year in which Strahan appeared:

Ronald Strahan left Hong Kong in 1961 for a senior lectureship in the University of New South Wales. He became well known in Australia as Director of Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney—a job he took over in 1967 and ran in difficult circumstances—and, later, for his books, on Australian mammals, for example, some written and illustrated with his second wife, the artist, Pamela Conder.

On his time in Hong Kong he wrote:

The Zoology Department, which had been sacked during the war, was not very well equipped, so I undertook research that needed little gear. I worked for a while on the water relations of a local toad, Bufo melanostictus, and its tolerance of saline water, which could explain its prevalence on offshore islands - in contrast to the local newts which appeared to have a distinct population on each island.

I was struck by the number of Hong Kong cats with short or kinked tails and read that this deformity was found from South-east Asia to Japan but with a peak in South China. I made a study of the vertebral column of the dozens of stray cats that were euthanased by the RSPCA each week and found that deformed tails were only the outward sign of internal aberrations - hemivertebrae, cervical and abdominal ribs, and variation in the number of precaudal vertebrae. The situation called for some genetic analysis and the University could provide ample accommodation for a good number of cats. With guidance from E.B. Ford in Oxford and J.B.S. Haldane in London, I mapped out a breeding strategy that should throw some light on the genetics of the condition but came up against an immovable obstacle: the RSPCA would provide me with as many dead cats as I required (cats that they had killed) but no live animals from which to breed. That, in their view, was vivisection. Another dead end.

It is clear that the correspondence between Jock Marshall and Ron Strahan must have concerned Marshall’s revision of the classic but by then extremely dated textbook by Parker and Haswell, the 7th edition published in 1962. My impression is that Marshall, in attempting to polish his credentials in classical zoology, as explained in his biography, landed himself with a great deal of work for little benefit since J.Z. Young’s Life of Vertebrates had supplanted volume 2 of Parker and Haswell. However, I digress. Marshall thanked Strahan, as well as a number of others, for assistance in reading and criticising sections of the manuscript.

Strahan himself on that subject:

My friend, A.J. (Jock) Marshall had undertaken to revise Parker and Haswell’s “Textbook of Zoology” and asked me to handle the chapter on the Agnatha (lampreys, hagfishes and fossil ostracoderms). Embarking on a review of the literature on hagfishes, I soon found out that much of it was scrappy, contradictory and ancient. So I spent my first sabbatical at the Swedish Academy of Science’s marine laboratory at Kristineberg, where hagfishes could be kept alive and underwater television could be employed to watch their in their deep-water habitat. Hagfishes are the most repulsive of vertebrates but they are fascinating relics (together with lampreys) of those that dominated the oceans in the Silurian. I studied a range of aspects of their life, from behaviour to anatomy, physiology and anatomy, in several visits to Sweden and in shorter periods in Japan, California and England.

One of Strahan's many diagrams drawn for Marshall's edition of Parker & Haswell.

Strahan’s short account, A Zig-Zag Career, of his life (published in Australian Zoologist in 2003) can be found here, with obituaries here and here.

Mellor B. 1980. The University of Hong Kong. An Informal History. Volume 2. Hong Kong University Press.

Parker, TJ, Haswell WA. 1962. A Textbook of Zoology Volume II. 7th edition, revised and largely rewritten by AJ Marshall. London: Macmillan.

Confessions of a Hong Kong Naturalist by G.T. Reels. A new book

A memoir of ten years surveying wildlife in the wetlands, forests and mountains of Hong Kong’s New Territories and offshore islands

When we reached Hong Kong in November, this book was waiting for us, having been spotted in a bookshop earlier in the year. I cannot recommend it too highly. It does what is says on the cover in that the author describes the survey work he undertook with colleagues in the University of Hong Kong, for the WWF (Hong Kong) and for Kadoorie Farm in the 1990s. Most of the work was instigated by his boss, David Dudgeon who really put the study of Hong Kong wildlife on the map, both in terms of research and public policy for conservation. Graham Reels first went to Hong Kong in 1975 as a schoolboy so he has seen the vast changes that have occurred there over the past 40 years.

His story of the wildlife observed, of the surveys for the wide biodiversity survey, of his colleagues (many of whom remain in Hong Kong engaged in conservation), of students and of his personal life is well worth reading if only to show how much more we know now, than, say, in 1968 when we left Hong Kong to return to the U.K.

There are also delightful waspish asides about: competitive bird ringers, birding organisations and their classification of native versus introduced species; some of the personalities of university, conservation organisations and government players; the herpetologists from the U.S.A. who visited Hong Kong regularly, discovered new species but then deposited their collections in an American museum. Reels also records the time of horizontal balkanization of the biological sciences in the University (which was later reversed).

Graham Reels was also one of the founders of the newsletter Porcupine! That hugely successful (and now greatly missed) venture from the University, which reported finds in the field, conservation issues and the latest research ran from 1992 until 2005. All the issues are available online here. I was delighted to read that my old friend and former colleague of 54 years, Daniel Chan, then head of zoology, provided the money for printing out of departmental funds.

The land habitats of Hong Kong have improved over the past 50 years, as I have stressed many times to those unfamiliar with the Hong Kong countryside. The author returned to do more work in 2014-2015 and very near the end of the book writes:

     I…was struck by how much the forests had grown and matured from the 1990s—and by how the rural landscape of Hong Kong had been transformed since I had first seen it in the 1970s, when forest cover was thin and most hill slopes and summits were either dominated by fire-maintained grassland or completely denuded. This progressive increase in woodland thickness and extent has pulled in a steady stream of forest-associated wildlife (mammals, birds, butterflies, dragonflies), recolonising from forested areas in Guangdong province, in recent decades, and will continue to do so as long as the Country Parks and Special Areas are respected. I say ‘recolonise’ because I am in no doubt that these arrivals were  here in the past, before human activities almost completely removed the original natural forest in the last few centuries.

One of the causes of deforestation, particularly on Hong Kong Island was, of course, the Japanese Occupation of late 1941 until 1945. Firewood for cooking was in such short supply that the hillsides were denuded of trees by a desperate local population concerned with survival.

Graham Reels ends:

     It was a fascinating experience and reminded me of how fortunate I had been in the job that had come my way in the past; how such a career of stumbling wide-eyed discovery seemed so unlikely now, when so much more is known about Hong Kong’s astonishingly rich and precious natural history. It lent impetus to the writing of this memoir.
     I hope it was a tale worth telling.

Yes, it was.

Although the book has been for sale in the book shops I have not been able to find it for sale in other parts of the world. I know that many former Hong Kong residents will want a copy so here are the details of the publisher, Graham Reels’s brother (who—spoiler alert—appears in the book): Atratothemis Books, PO Box 6, San Tin Post Office,1A Castle Peak Road, New Territories, Hong Kong. ISBN 978-988-78049-1-8.

Charles Eliot: languages, embassies, universities and nudibranch molluscs

It is difficult to believe that Sir Charles Eliot (1862-1931) who achieved great distinction in languages, culture and comparative religion and who served as a British diplomat and as vice-chancellor of two new universities developed as a hobby the study of nudibranch molluscs and published a number of authoritative papers on their taxonomy and phylogeny.

Knowledge stuck to him ‘like fly-paper’ and he came to have twenty-seven languages at his command, often acquired at amazing speed. He published a first grammar in English of Finnish. From Oxford, he joined the diplomatic service and served in Russia, Morocco, Turkey and the USA. He also served as British Commissioner in Samoa.

While Commissioner, Commander-in-Chief and Consul-General for the East Africa Protectorate Eliot had a strong disagreement with the Foreign Secretary over who should be allowed to buy land. He resigned by means of an open telegram. After that dramatic resignation from the diplomatic service he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the new University of Sheffield in 1905. In effect he was the first vice-chancellor but W.M. Hicks who was Principal of the university college that was to be a constituent of the new university did not want to become vice-chancellor but to continue as Professor of Physics. Hicks, because he had done all the work to establish the university, was persuaded to be named as Vice-Chancellor in the Charter but then to hand over to Eliot immediately afterwards. It is clear that to many observers, Eliot was not the ideal Vice-Chancellor. Shy and withdrawn other than with personal friends—and ‘given to formidable silences’—he left the administrative work to the Registrar and throughout each vacation travelled widely in the East. However, it is clear that his hands-off approach worked because the new university thrived.

In 1912, he took on another new university—this time Hong Hong and it had hardly reached the embryonic stage by the time of his arrival. There were only three full-time members of staff. Eliot’s diplomatic skills soon brought in money from the wealthy Chinese in Hong Kong and Malaya. He was noted as being completely ignorant of finances and had an aversion to mechanical devices; he refused to use the telephone. In Hong Kong, he had daily lessons in Mandarin. Again, such was his devotion to acquiring a language, he later translated into English three large volumes of Chinese Buddhist scriptures. Although he had no need to do so, he lectured and held tutorials such that he was popular with the students. A student hall of residence was named to commemorate his vice-chancellorship in 1914. The Hall lost its name after the landslide in 1966 when the three halls, built one above the other were combined into one. However, more recently it was retained when one of the halls was demolished and is now back as Eliot Hall.

He was recalled by the Foreign Office to the temporary job of High Commissioner in Siberia in 1918. He did not return to Hong Kong because he was appointed British Ambassador in Tokyo.

Throughout his life Eliot was a prolific writer on his observations during travel and on eastern religions. After his retirement from the embassy in Tokyo, he remained in Japan for five years. Suffering from heart disease he was returning to Britain by sea when his condition deteriorated. Advised to stay ashore when the ship reached Singapore from Kobe, he opted to continue. on 17 March 1931 he died on board the Japanese ship Hakone Maru approximately midway between Penang and Colombo. The captain of the ship conducted a burial at sea with, since there was no one on board to do otherwise, Buddhist rites. The ceremony was described in The Times of 7 April. Appropriately, it would seem, Eliot’s book Japanese Buddhism was published posthumously, in 1935.

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The story of Eliot’s interest in nudibranchs is that while in Samoa in 1899 he became fascinated by their beauty and behaviour. He quickly acquired sufficient knowledge to publish a paper on the Samoan nudibranchs. After that he worked on the local nudibranch fauna wherever he was posted as a diplomat and on collections from a number of expeditions, including the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition of 1902-1904. What does not seem to have been picked up by his biographers is that Eliot appointed a key member of that expedition—Robert Rudmose Brown (1879-1957)—as lecturer in geography in Sheffield. In Sheffield, Eliot had his own laboratory to which he retired when not busy as vice-chancellor. I have already explained how Eliot resigned from the diplomatic service on a point of principle, He was no ‘yes’ man and his comment in a letter to another vice-chancellor shows his disgust for an early manifestation of the imposition of pseudo-accountability. He complained that the Board of Education:

…want to know how many hours the Professors lecture. Nothing so ungentlemanly has been done by the Government since they actually insisted on knowing at what time Foreign Office clerks arrive in Whitehall.

I have Eliot down as one of the good guys.

From Eliot's paper, On some nudibranchs from east Africa and Zanzibar.
Part VI. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London
1905 2, 268-298, plates 16-17

Blunden E. 1962. Sir Charles Eliot. In, University of Hong Kong. The First 50 Years, 1911-1961. edited by Brian Harrison. Hong Kong University Press.

Chapman AW. 1955. The Story of a Modern University. A History of the University of Sheffield. Oxford University Press

Mellor B. 1980. The University of Hong Kong. An Informal History. Volume 1. Hong Kong University Press

R.W. Obituary: Sir Charles Eliot, 1862–1931. Journal of Molluscan Studies 19, Issue 5, 224–226

A list of Eliot’s papers on nudibranchs can be found here.

The University of Hong Kong was a site for more than birds in the 1960s

In the 1960s, the University Compound’s pathways teemed at night with the toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus (formerly Bufo melanostictus), along with introduced Giant African Snail, Achatina fulica.

Duttaphyrnus melanostictus

The lily pond had large numbers of Guenther’s Frogs (Sylvirana, previously Hylarana guentheri).

Lily pond, University of Hong Kong, constructed in the early 1950s. The trees

were non-native. From Mellor, B. The University of Hong Kong, An Informal

History.  Hong Kong University Press, 1980

After heavy rain, the gardeners disturbed a couple of the microhylid, Kaloula pulchra, outside our lab building, the old Building 15 of the medical school (which by 1965 had moved to its new quarters on Sassoon Road).

Kaloula pulchra

The same location revealed a couple of Brahminy Blind Snakes under an old flowerpot. This species, now going under the name of Indotyphlops braminus, has been introduced into many parts of the world in...flowerpots.

This photograph from 1950 shows a University Congregation processing along
Pokfulam Road. I found Kaloula pulchra over the wall to the right, 17 years later
All the building in view have been demolished. From Mellor 1980

Street lamps and flats had the Oriental Leaf-toed Gecko, Hemidactylus bowringii. They often looked thin and underfed like the one I photographed.

Hemidactylus bowringii

A squad of gardeners looked after the compound and cleared fallen leaves. Snakes were, therefore, not to be expected. However, we did one spot a couple of times an Indo-Chinese Rat Snake, Ptyas korros, on the ground at the base of a tree directly below our balcony at 3 University Drive.

The only other snake seen took me by surprise. I opened a lab drawer containing glassware one morning to find a White-spotted Slug Snake (Pareas margaritophorus) less than happy at being disturbed.

If only digital camera traps had been invented in the 60s, we might have got an idea what, if any, mammals, other than rats, mice and domestic cats and watchmen were living in or visiting the Compound. A Chinese Ferret Badger (Melogale moschata) or two would be my bet.

Oliver LA, Prendini E, Kraus F, Raxworthy CJ. 2015. Systematics and biogeography of the Hylarana frog (Anura: Ranidae) radiation across tropical Australasia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 90, 176-192. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2015.05.001 

Hedges SB, Marion AB, Lipp KM, Marin J, Vidal N.  2014. A taxonomic framework for typhlopid snakes from the Caribbean and other regions (Reptilia, Squamata). Caribbean Herpetology 49, 1–61.

Why was the University of Hong Kong a good site for birdwatchers in the 1960s?

In the early bird reports for Hong Kong, the University Compound (now called ‘campus’) often got a mention. There are two reasons. The first is that from Herklots in the 1930s there was often a birdwatcher or two living and working there. The second is that it was wooded hillside interspersed with green spaces, shrubberies, ponds and gardens. Some of the trees, unlike the wooden floors, window frames and roof timbers of the buildings, may have survived the Japanese occupation. The steep paths and steps (84 between the old Building 15 and 3 University Drive) allowed views into the tree tops.

1965 view from 3 University Drive over part of the University Compound.

The white buildings are on the north side of Pokfulam Road.

The partially hidden brick buildings were pre-clinical labs

vacated when the medical school moved to Sassoon Road

The compound was though already falling from grace in the early 1960s because of the spate of new building from the early 1950s (new staff flats) until the, for then, large new chemistry block, library, students’ union and first phase of Robert Black College. However, from 1965 until we left in 1968, the compound was undisturbed by new building.

The Compound. bounded by a nullah to the west. was a good place to see all the common Hong Kong birds including winter and summer visitors. It was also good for passage migrants (the delights of Po Toi island were then unknown). Blue and White Flycatchers appeared in numbers in April 1966. What are again named Ince’s or Chinese Paradise Flycatchers again (after a period of being lumped into Asian) appeared in the spring. We saw a spectacular fully-tailed male each day from 12 March until 5 April 1966.

Above the university and to the west of University Drive (now, I see renamed University Avenue), Conduit Path was good in the winter for thrushes and Rubythroats and the Violet Whistling Thrush was rarely absent from the sides of the nullah that, further downhill, bordered the Compound.

We overlooked the tree tops in the western part of the compound when we lived for a year in a flat in the very well designed 3 University Drive (now demolished). Cicadas in the evenings and bulbuls  by day were the overwhelming sounds. All could be heard because traffic on Pokfulam Road was relatively light. Large insects flew on to the balcony in the evenings, once pursued by a Collared Scops Owl that did a quick about turn when it saw me.

However, the green and pleasant old Compound did not last. High-rise building followed high-rise building as student numbers increased. Departments housed on the north side of Pokfulam Road were moved into the Compound as the buildings were demolished for road widening. The old preclinical medical buildings were cleared and huge blocks replaced the gardens.

Writing in 1983 in what was then the University’s newspaper, Interflow (Issue 39, March 1983), the late Harry Edie, a botanist, questioned what was going on under the self-explanatory title, 'Tropical Paradise or Concrete Inferno'. In making a plea for expert botanical input into planning the campus in order to preserve wildlife and continue to provide amenity value to the human inhabitants surrounded by closely packed tall buildings, Harry showed photographs of the Compound as it was in the 1970s.

One of Harry Edie's photographs showing the University Compound in
the 1960s and early 1970s

Another Harry Edie photograph showing the (non-university) hillside
in the foreground. No 3 University Drive is front central; No 2 is the
orange block. Robert Black College has the blue roof. The Vice-
Chancellor's Lodge is on the far left. The large block of flats is beyond
the University Compound.

Photograph of 3 University Drive from Harry Edie's article. Note the
lush vegetation of the gardens

1966 view from Conduit Path. The University Library is left; 3 University
Drive is front centre and the old house on University Path is right.
All now demolished except the library

The general sub-tropical regrowth of trees and plants incorporated into landscape designs did mean that in the 1990s the Compound was still a good habitat for birds, even though much of the land area was covered by concrete. Between the 1960s and 1990s a number of species expanded their ranges. For example, apart from isolated reports the only reliable site for Fork-tailed Sunbirds in the mid-1960s was Tai Po Kau Forest Reserve in the New Territories. By 1997, a pair was nesting in creeper at Robert Black College a short distance from our room.

Further expansion of the University, this time with blocks built to the west of the old Compound has completely altered the landscape in the past fifteen years. But some of the old trees and wilder areas remain and new planting around the buildings can be seen. It is difficult to assess by occasional visits at different times of year whether the Compound, sorry Campus, still provides a stop-over for passage migrants or suitable habitat for the common residents and seasonal visitors.

The Hong Kong Birdwatching Society no longer lists the University as a good site but it does include the land above it—Lung Fu Shan.