The common Kingfisher takes off from a pergola at the tea house in SiHai GongYuan ...
distinguish – but seventy of them? Or sixty kinds of bamboo? I cannot tell.
In another area about 200 rare and endangered plant species have been settled. I consider most impressive those corners where shade-loving plants are thriving, here it is dark and cosy. The air in ShenZhen often suffers a humidity of 90% or more, and after ten metres outside the house you are completely wet from sweat. Here in this cool corner it drips down to a certain extent. Ferns, begonias, orchids are found, and for me, best rest and relaxation.
Although 170 species of lotus flowers are advertised here, I have found the loveliest
... where it has been sitting for some while. A white-throated kingfisher, about twice as large as the European kingfisher, in the Lotus Blossom Hill Park.
But now he is off to the next hide.
Very hard to detect in the city, not easy to be photographed: the brown shrike.
Even harder to detect, still more rare: the black-faced cuckoo shrike, mainly prevalent in Australia, that it showed up in a Chinese city was a huge surprise for me!
This little bird is seen in parks quite often, but taking pictures is challenging, for it is persistently in motion: the Japanese white-eye.
Another surprise: in a ShenZhen park, on a pond, I met some black-headed mountain finches, relatives of the European bullfinches and grosbeaks. The mountain finches actually live in the mountainous regions of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and in the high mountains of western China.
ones in urban parks. In my Four Lakes Park or even more so in the Lotus Blossom Hill Park, it is simply overwhelming to see how the lotuses, together with water lily, sometimes completely overgrow the ponds, span a vast umbrella of many colours and attract insects in such abundance that their whizzing almost seems to drown the nearby traffic noise.
And if you watch attentively, you may observe in-midst the sea of lotus flower the Chinese versions of the wagtails or my friends, the red-whiskered bulbuls, fluttering back and forth and hunting for food.
I am not surprised that the Botanical Garden also features all kinds of mango trees and 30 species of lychees, more than may be familiar to the highly literate fruit seller, ChaoMiao (whom I will introduce to you soon). Although lychees are among my favourite Chinese fruits, I have never seen the different species growing on trees, except for one species that I also buy from my fruit seller. Here, as in the parks, people are allowed to harvest them themselves and take them home (in one park, you pay, I think, twenty RMB, or about 1.5
Euro, and you may fill your bags, in other parks you may take as much as you find).
I love strolling around in relaxed fashion, camera in hand, sometimes I take images of ferns, sometimes of palms or of desert plants and cacti. I always watch people and enjoy their active social life in this botanical garden, even though they do not “seriously” want to study the botany, let alone the birds and insects, but only their friends, their girlfriend, their granddaughter. And, I ask you: In which botanical garden in Germany may you just go fishing? Not only from the bank, but even from a boat?
And in what park in Germany may guys (in that case that I could observe they were about seventeen years) climb into the trees and pick mangoes? This way I have even noticed for the first time what mango trees are indeed looking like, I have spoken with the guys and got two fruits for a present, still green, they ripened in my apartment and tasted delicious.
The black face spoonbill, a most rare species anywhere in the world, lands near the coast at the “HongShuLin GongYuan” (Mangrove Park) in shallow water ...
… a second one joins, and they spoon up in the shallow water near the mangroves for food by pushing the half-open beaks laterally through the water. As soon as they feel something delicious in the beaks, they close them and swallow.
A little egret on the sea has recently caught a small fish in flight by scouring across the shallow water and plunging his bill down at the right moment; on the photo you do not see the head, but the reflection in the water reveals head and beak and the fish in the beak.
The peach blossoming in the botanical garden offers for a few days a stunning red flowerage. The first blossoms appear before the first leaves.
Everywhere bees are buzzing, roaming for nectar.
Not only the individual blossoms are impressive, but also the abundance of peach trees (here shrubs throughout, rather than trees) offers the viewer a veritable red flower ocean.
The peach blossoming enjoys all over China a long tradition. Peaches have been cultivated here for several thousand years. Only about 1000 years ago they came to Central Europe. In China the peach is a symbol of long life. The peach blossoming has yet another meaning, though: an unmarried person (being at least a bit superstitious) looking for a partner shall walk three times around a flowering peach tree, then her wish will come true.…