About Wild Beijing

Wild Beijing

Wild Beijing, at wildbeijing.org, is a Beijing wildlife website launched in August 2010 as Birding Beijing by Terry Townshend, a British conservationist living and working in Beijing, and later renamed Wild Beijing. It celebrates the birds and other wildlife found in and around China's capital, a city that has recorded more than 500 species of birds. Through the site, Townshend initiated tracking projects on the Beijing Swift and the Beijing Cuckoo that first established their migrations to southern Africa, became a BirdLife International Species Champion in 2012 for his work on Jankowski's Bunting, and in 2021 became the first foreign recipient of a gold Beijing Citizen Award for services to the environment.

Origins as Birding Beijing in 2010

Townshend arrived in Beijing in 2009, then working for a London-based non-governmental organisation, to assist with drafting environmental laws. In August 2010 he launched Birding Beijing as a blog celebrating the birds that can be found in and around China's capital. The site later broadened beyond birds and took the name Wild Beijing, reflecting a remit that now covers the capital's mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects as well. Townshend describes himself as a Beijing-based wildlife conservationist and a Fellow of the Paulson Institute, working at both policy and project levels and spending at least two days a week working with Chinese non-governmental organisations and universities. He is also an advisor to the Paulson Institute's conservation programme in China and a collaborating researcher with the Peking University Center for Nature and Society.

Beijing's surprising biodiversity

The site's central message is that Beijing is far wilder than most residents imagine. More than 500 species of birds have been recorded in the capital, a total Townshend notes beats London, Washington, D.C., Moscow and Paris, and ranks Beijing second among G20 capital cities for recorded bird species. The reason is geography: Beijing sits at the heart of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, the migration route running from the Arctic, Siberia and Alaska down through twenty-two countries to Australia and New Zealand, and the capital acts as a service station on that flyway each spring and autumn. Beyond birds, Townshend points to wild cats in the capital's mountains, seventeen species of snakes and more than 170 species of butterflies, four to five times the number found in the United Kingdom. His sound recordings from Beijing locations, shared on the xeno-canto bird sound archive, include nocturnal flight calls recorded at Lingshan in Mentougou District and a wild boar family recorded near the Great Wall at Mutianyu.

The Beijing Swift project

The Beijing Swift, a subspecies that has nested in the city's gatehouses and temples for centuries and spends nearly all of its life in the air, eating, drinking and even sleeping on the wing, became the site's flagship research subject. In May 2014, ultra-lightweight backpacks containing tiny light-sensing geolocators were fitted to thirty-one Beijing Swifts as part of a banding operation by the China Birdwatching Society at the Summer Palace, in a collaboration between scientists from China, Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The results, reported in May 2015, revealed that the swifts breeding at the Summer Palace travel more than 13,000 kilometres to spend the winter in southern Africa before returning the following spring, a round trip later summarised at about 26,000 kilometres a year. Townshend has since presented the swift's story widely, including in a TEDxShanghai talk titled The Incredible Life of the Beijing Swift, while noting that swifts in Beijing have declined sharply over recent decades.

The Beijing Cuckoo project

The Beijing Cuckoo Project applied the same approach to another migrant. Working with the British Trust for Ornithology, Chinese academics, birdwatching societies and schools, the project set out to enthuse the Chinese public about bird migration and to discover the then-unknown wintering grounds and migration route of the Beijing Cuckoo. The cuckoos were to be named by Beijing schoolchildren, who would follow their progress as part of an environmental curriculum piloted in Beijing schools. The tracking produced a celebrated result: a yearly migration route of about 32,000 kilometres between Beijing and Cape Town, and one individual cuckoo, nicknamed Flappy McFlapperson, became famous among bird lovers for her journeys between the two cities. The project received financial support from the Zoological Society of London, the Oriental Bird Club and the British Birds Charitable Trust, which paid for the satellite tags.

Jankowski's Bunting and species champion work

Townshend has spearheaded efforts to save some of China's most endangered birds, in particular Jankowski's Bunting, a poorly known bird of remote northeast China with a known population at the time of under one hundred pairs. In 2012, in recognition of that work, he became a Species Champion with BirdLife International. The bunting work took the Birding Beijing platform beyond the capital, into species conservation in the bird's remaining grassland habitat, and it established Townshend's reputation in China as a conservationist working on Chinese endangered species rather than only writing about them.

Recognition: the Beijing Citizen Award

In 2021 Townshend became the first foreign recipient of a gold Beijing Citizen Award for services to the environment, a distinction reported by China Daily. Chinese state media have repeatedly featured his work: the State Council Information Office carried his proposal that the Beijing Swift and Beijing Cuckoo should serve as ambassadors for Belt and Road ecological cooperation, arguing that the birds migrate along the Belt and Road from East Asia to southern Africa and back each year, and that the initiative could encourage protection of migratory routes and key habitats. A later China Daily profile described how, when night falls in Beijing, Townshend treats the predawn darkness as a migrant highway, and credited him with raising awareness and even assisting in policy drafting to help conserve the capital's migratory species.

From blog to Wild Beijing

What began as a birding blog has grown into a broader celebration of urban biodiversity. As Wild Beijing, the site presents the capital's wildlife through Townshend's photography and writing, covering frogs, reptiles and amphibians alongside birds and butterflies, and it connects readers to nature in one of the world's largest capital cities. Townshend frames the purpose in the words of Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum: people conserve only what they love, and they love only what they understand. China Daily described the site as an ode to urban biodiversity, built during years in which Townshend also travelled across China, including Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, during a period of unemployment.

Public engagement and education

Engagement runs through all of the site's projects. The cuckoo project was designed so that Beijing schoolchildren named the tracked birds and followed them through a specially designed social media app and a pilot environmental curriculum, with coverage expected in mainstream Chinese media reaching audiences who would not ordinarily read about bird migration. The swift research was presented to general audiences through talks and media coverage in China and abroad. By attaching names, stories and live tracks to individual birds, Wild Beijing turns migration science into a public narrative, and its founder has used that platform to argue for habitat and flyway protection in policy settings as well as in print.

Why Wild Beijing matters

Wild Beijing occupies an unusual position in Chinese nature media: an English-language site, run by a British conservationist, that has produced primary science about Chinese wildlife, including the first established migration routes of the Beijing Swift and the Beijing Cuckoo, while also shaping how Beijing's own residents see their city. Its record includes more than 500 recorded bird species championed in the capital, a BirdLife International species championship for work on Jankowski's Bunting, collaboration with the China Birdwatching Society, the British Trust for Ornithology and Peking University researchers, and a gold Beijing Citizen Award in 2021. For anyone wanting to understand the wildlife of China's capital, wildbeijing.org is the reference point its founder has spent well over a decade building.