pond life

If you’ve read Super Dooper, you will know that I decry the modern usage of words like ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing’ merely to express a liking for something, but having said that, I had an amazing experience last week. In fact, I had two amazing experiences, the second of which was even more magical than the first!

I’d originally spent some time exploring the fish ponds between San Tin and the frontier earlier this year, at which time I didn’t think there was much scope for development, but Paula hadn’t been this way before, and now that she has retired, she has far more time on her hands, so it had to be worth another look.

Last Tuesday, we started from the point on San Tin Tsuen Road that I identified in New Fields, and I was struck immediately by the sheer number and variety of birds that we saw. Most were migratory species that I hadn’t seen during that earlier exploration, and I was surprised in particular by the sheer number of Japanese cormorants, which in previous years I’d often seen on the Kam Tin River and in the fish ponds near Fairview Park. But not as early as October!

After several hundred metres, I suddenly became aware that I was being buzzed by huge numbers of what I assumed must be a species of swift. They were zooming around like kamikaze pilots, so I stopped to take a photograph:

The strange thing is that we encountered these birds for only about 200 metres. There were none anywhere else on this first foray. Actually, there was an even stranger thing: I had a video camera mounted on my handlebar, yet it didn’t occur to me to switch it on, probably because the camera was there to record cycling! We simply had to come back, which we did two days later.

I started the video the moment we entered the fish pond area, and if anything the whole experience was even more intense than it had been two days earlier. Here are two stills from that video:

The first shows a pond with hundreds of egrets, while the second captures a few swifts. Overall, the video was rather disappointing, because it doesn’t convey the sheer intensity of the experience, but see for yourself:

The ‘swift experience’ begins at about 3:20 and continues to the end of the video. On our first venture, we had turned right at the junction seen in the second still above, but the video shows us turning left, because I wanted to show Paula some of the things that I’d discovered on my earlier exploration, in particular the unmanned crossing point into Shenzhen, which isn’t accessible by motor vehicles, and as you will see below, is literally ‘off the beaten track’ towards the end.

I haven’t uploaded any of the videos to YouTube that I recorded along this section, but here is a sequence of stills that illustrates what it’s like hereabouts:

Just before we reached the crossing point, Paula glanced to her right and immediately stopped:

She had spotted a dozen cormorants perched on a dead tree, but by the time I’d got my camera out, all but two had buggered off:

We eventually retraced our steps, and I recorded a second video that is now available to view on YouTube. Here are two stills from that video:

And here is the full video:

It follows the route of the first video in reverse. Incidentally, I’m not an ornithologist, but I’ve tentatively identified the zooming projectiles as Pacific swifts. Please correct me if you think I’m mistaken.

You can be sure that we’ll be back to see what else we might discover. Paula is currently in Kuala Lumpur, where she has been invited to run a two-day workshop on assessment at the local university, and I had been due to go out for a bike ride with my friend Vlad today. However, I received an email yesterday to say that he couldn’t make it. I hadn’t told him where I planned to take him, other than the vague phrase ‘out west’. I think that he’s going to be gobsmacked when he finally experiences the San Tin fish ponds.