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 notebooks and half-remembered conversations. I wanted to bring as much of that together as possible in one place, and to make it easy to interrogate.

The result is a new interactive page: the Status of the Birds of Beijing.

It currently covers more than 550 species, arranged in taxonomic order and following the new global AviList taxonomy. For each species there is a short account of its status in Beijing, and, where available, the highest counts recorded. For the rarer vagrants I have tried to include the specific records — dates, sites and observers — because for a rarity the individual records are the status.

I want to be clear that it is a records-based figure rather than an official list — a count of the species for which I have been able to find reliable records, which is not the same thing as a formally adjudicated Beijing list. It includes some historical records, and also a handful of older records where changing municipal boundaries make it genuinely hard to be sure whether the bird was seen within present-day Beijing at all. I have kept these in for interest and completeness, flagged by their status, rather than quietly dropping them; where a species is known only from the past it is labelled Historical.

How to use the page

The page is built to be interrogated rather than simply read top to bottom.

You can search by typing any part of a name — English, scientific or Chinese — into the search box. Typing “bunting”, Emberiza, or 鹀 will all bring up the buntings; typing “Shahe” or an observer’s name will surface the accounts that mention them.

You can filter by status using the coloured buttons, so you can, for example, show only the vagrants, or only the residents, in a moment.

And you can jump to any family using the family navigation, which stays in view as you scroll.

The status labels

Each species carries one or more status labels, shown as coloured tags:

Resident — present year-round
Summer — a summer visitor, typically breeding
Passage — a passage migrant, passing through in spring and/or autumn
Winter — a winter visitor
Vagrant — a rare or irregular visitor, well outside its normal range or occurrence
Historical — recorded in the past but not in recent times
Exotic — an introduced or escaped species

Many birds, of course, don’t fit neatly into a single box, and this is where the labels do their most useful work. A species can carry several tags at once, and the first tag is its primary status — the way the bird is most often encountered in Beijing — with the others shown alongside in a lighter shade. If you would rather see only each species’ primary status, there is a “Match primary status only” option next to the filters.

An example: the White Wagtail  
The White Wagtail is a good illustration of why a single label is rarely enough. In Beijing it is shown as Passage, Summer, Winter and Vagrant — passage being its primary status, because that is how most people encounter it, in numbers on migration in spring and autumn. But that headline hides a more complex status, which the account unpacks: no fewer than seven subspecies have been recorded here, and each has its own status. The race leucopsis breeds; ocularis is a common passage migrant; baicalensis and alba pass through mainly in spring; lugens is chiefly a scarce winter visitor; and personata and alboides are rare vagrants. So the same “species” is, depending on which subspecies you are looking at, a breeder, a migrant and a winter visitor all at once. The multi-label system is an attempt to reflect that real-world complexity.

Sources and acknowledgements

This page stands on the shoulders of many others. Sources include The Birds of Beijing (Cai Qikan, 1987); The Breeding Birds of Peking as Related to the Palearctic and Oriental Life Regions (Wilder, G. D., 1930); A Handbook to the Birds of Eastern China (J. D. D. La Touche, 1931–1935); The Birds of Hopei Province (Tsen-Hwang Shaw, 1936); the China Bird Reports (CBR) of 2003–2007; Birds of Beijing (2021); birdreport.cn; eBird; birding WeChat groups; and personal notes.

A huge thank you to all the birders who have submitted sightings to one or more of these repositories, and especially to the group who collect information about important Beijing records, including Guan Xiangyu, Dave Guo, Huang Hanchen, Huang Mingjun, Liu Aitao, Li Zhaonan, Lou Fangzhou, Wang Ruiqu, Wei Chunzhi, Zhang Qianyi and Paul Holt, and to Steve Bale for uncovering some important historical references.

A plea

I want to be honest about what this page is and isn’t. It is a living summary, not a finished work, and it is certainly not comprehensive. There are inevitably gaps, and probably inaccuracies too — most likely in the specific records of rare species, where a single overlooked report or a misremembered date can matter a great deal.  And also some of the status labels assigned are a little subjective and may benefit from greater scrutiny.

So this is a request as much as an announcement. If you spot an omission, an error, or a record that should be added or corrected, please let me know. Beijing’s birders, collectively, know far more than any single summary can capture, and the page will only get better with your help. Corrections, additions and updates are all warmly welcomed. Any errors or omissions that remain are entirely my own.

I hope you find it useful — and I hope it sends you out to look a little harder at the “common” birds, which so often turn out to be more interesting than their label suggests.

Explore the Status of the Birds of Beijing →

Cover image: watercolour of birding in Beijing by Madeleine Donahue.