Every year with concern, they watch the birds fly.

Early this year, with broken hearts, they picked up bird carcasses along their flight paths.

This autumn, they received birds from Europe and Siberia and sent them off towards the southern skies.

The people who monitor bird migration in China say they are worried. Will the birds find safe nests tomorrow? Will they all come back unscathed next spring? Will they always find safe habitats in our troubled world?

"Hundreds of migratory birds dropped dead over my head in Qinghai Lake because of bird flu," said Cao Liang, a director of the China Wildlife Protection Association, who visited the nature reserve in the Qinghai Province early this year. "It's scary."

H5N1, the deadly virus that has crept from East Asia to Europe, threatening human lives and crippling the poultry industry, is challenging China's wildlife protectionists to find any ways possible to help migrants.

"The earlier we detect the virus in the migratory birds, the quicker we can control its mutation from wild birds to poultry, and the better we can find ways to protect the wild birds," said Zhang Zhengwang, zoology professor at Beijing Normal University.

So, the observing of migration patterns, which has been going on for decades, takes on added significance.

This could be the largest action to look after wild birds in history. At least a quarter of the world's migratory birds fly over China on their way to Europe, Central and Southeast Asia, Australia and North America.

China provides habitats and rendezvous for 1,244 species, of which 565 migrate, Chinese ornithologists say. It hosts more birds than the entire European continent, Zhang said.

Of the 565 migratory species in China, 136 are listed as endangered and are protected by international treaties, Zhang said.

Wildlife protectionists fear that the spread of avian flu in Asia's countryside and poultry farms is likely to slash the number of travelling birds and even wipe out some species.

Watching them do everything

Day after day, observers work at posts across China in unheated makeshift houses, some far from their families.

Hour after hour, they watch the migration over their heads intensely for any sign that may hint of danger, sometimes with no equipment.

An ornithological map of the world shows eight major migration routes, also called flyways, for different birds. Three of them the Central Asian-Indian flyway, East Asian-Australian flyway, and West Pacific flyway converge over the Chinese mainland before they extend to other places.

The overlapping area of the three flyways almost entirely covers China, Zhang said.

Wildlife conservationists and government forestry agencies also face another task: building a nationwide monitoring system to prevent bird flu from hurting the migrants.

In October, when fear of a bird flu outbreak peaked again in the context of a new migration season, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) allocated a special budget of 4 million yuan (US$500,000) to activate 118 national-level monitoring stations.

The network, once with a staff of 600, now includes 400 more people, all from the SFA system. Scientists from many research groups and universities, including about 100 of China's top ornithologists, are offering their services, as well.

However, many of the monitoring sites are simple. Some of the smallest ones are not even equipped with adequate facilities, with only three to five people patrolling on foot, watching birds with naked eyes.

Most of the staff use telescopes, but in the wilderness, such as in the mountains and in wetlands, they go where even four-wheel-drive vehicles can't. "They have to walk all day long, some in freezing cold," said Chu Dong, a senior official at the system headquarters in Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province.

Since good telescopes cost 10,000 yuan (US$1,230) apiece, a budget of 4 million yuan (US$493,000) is obviously too small. So the SFA proposed a new budget for next year to the central government, according to Wang Wei, SFA deputy director of wildlife and forest protection. It is requesting nearly 80 million yuan (US$9.9 million), or 20 times the spending this year, to add about 180 sites to the national monitoring network.

"The central government is willing to put more efforts into monitoring migrating birds in relation to the bird flu threat, compared with this year's spending," Wang said.

In addition, the conservationists would like to expand a banding system for migrating birds in which radio tags attached to birds' backs are tracked by satellite. The problem is the prohibitive cost - US$10,000 a year for each bird under surveillance, said Lu Jun, head of the National Bird Banding Centre of China.

Despite all the difficulties, however, China's bird monitoring system is fairly extensive. Most of the sites are based in nature reserves and national bird banding centres, where trackers usually rings made of plastic and metal are placed around the birds' legs.

Besides the national-level monitoring stations, provincial-level forestry authorities have built about 400. All these migration monitoring sites cover China's major stopovers, breeding grounds and winter habitats.

"We need to know where the birds are as soon as they arrive to observe how they fly, how they walk, how they eat, how they rest, and how they do just about everything," Lu said. "The earlier we detect any problem, the better we can take note of their reactions."

When the birds die

According to the SFA's emergency task plan, monitors are required to report daily any sick or dead migrating bird to the system's headquarters in Shenyang, also the location of the national forestry protection centre.

Staff at the monitoring sites generally suggest to the local agricultural authorities that farmers should keep their poultry away from the migrants to avoid any cross-species transmission of diseases.

Once sick or dead birds are spotted, the monitoring staff, wearing protective uniforms, place them in special containers and send them for testing at designated quarantine agencies.

From Qinghai-Tibetan and Mongolian highlands to the muddy shores of eastern China, and the coral reefs in the South China Sea, millions of birds find their winter playgrounds every year.

Their favourite hangouts are Poyang Lake in the Yangtze River Delta, Dongting Lake in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, the seashores in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, and especially as a major breeding habitat in the summer, Qinghai Lake in the Tibetan-Qinghai highlands.

But in recent years, diseases have become more prevalent among the wild birds and killed a greater number of them, leading veterinarians told the media. The latest tragedy was in April 2005, at Qinghai Lake, China's largest saltwater lake and a habitat for more than 100,000 birds during peak season. An outbreak of bird flu caused by H5N1 killed as many as 6,000.

"I even saw them fly over my head and next second just drop dead," recalled Li Yinghua, a bird specialist at the Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve.

The virus has infected large numbers of bar-headed geese, great black-headed gulls, brown-headed gulls, ruddy shelducks and great cormorants.

This year, as H5N1 has spread to more places worldwide, including the poultry farms in nine provinces and autonomous regions in China, wildlife specialists are all the more concerned about the birds' safety and health.

Watch and wait

For now, though, conservationists admit that they can do little more than monitor and give early warnings to local health and agricultural authorities. They cannot vaccinate the birds.

Out of compassion, some people did experiment with it but were unsuccessful. Cao Liang, director of the China Wildlife Protection Association, said he and his colleagues once attempted to feed the birds with corn mixed with vaccine, but they "just flew away."

Akiko Kamata, spokesman of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, confirmed the difficulty. "No country is so far trying to vaccinate wild birds against H5N1," he said.

But other threats are apparent, as well. Equally deadly is the public fear of wild birds as carriers of the disease, especially when reports blamed the last few outbreaks on them.

TV news reports have begun to show people killing birds. In the areas hit by the bird flu outbreaks in the country, wild birds are killed along with the poultry, sometimes even rare birds kept in local zoos.

In some areas, people are driving wild birds away, not even allowing them to make a stopover. "These actions may lead to the extinction of some endangered migrating birds," Cao said.

In early November, the fact that about 100 wild ducks were found killed by mass poisoning in a lake in Yulin in northwest China's Shaanxi Province shocked wildlife workers and forestry officials. Although the investigation is still ongoing, the deliberate killing of the wild birds showed no less a threat than the lethal virus.

Despite meagre manpower and resources, wildlife workers and forestry agencies are launching a publicity campaign to raise awareness of the need to protect the migrating birds. Cao said: "Our message is really simple: Please do not disturb. Let the wild birds eat and rest in their natural habitat, and then let them fly away."

(China Daily November 24, 2005)