Latest Stories
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Pallas’s Bunting to be split into Mongolian Reed Bunting and Siberian Reed Bunting
An important paper on the taxonomy of Pallas’s Reed Bunting has just been published in Avian Research: Buchheim, Franke, Dumont de Chassart et al. (2026), “Taxonomy of Pallas’s Reed Bunting (Emberiza pallasi): An integrative approach” (doi.org/10.1016/j.avrs.2026.100444). It’s open access and, for anyone with an interest in East Asia’s birds, well worth reading. The authors drew…
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2026 Nature Watch Festival on the Tibetan Plateau
I am now back in Beijing from the 2026 “Nature Watch” in Nangqen, Yushu Prefecture, and my batteries are fully recharged. ⚡ There’s nothing quite like watching people celebrate nature in a place this special. Over three days, 16 teams of young people from across China partnered with local herding families for a “bioblitz” –…
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Introducing the new Interactive Status of the Birds of Beijing
For anyone who watches birds in Beijing, particularly visitors to the city, one question comes up again and again: is this a good record? Is this species a regular visitor, a scarce migrant, or something genuinely unusual? Until now, answering that has meant piecing together scattered sources — old provincial avifaunas, China Bird Reports, personal…