Spring Migration - Shanghai China 2017 Images

Spring Migration - Shanghai China 2017 images:

Updated: Monday June 19, 2017

Enjoy the birds and photos below...I certainly did while I was taking them!

Erik Breden
Weslaco, Texas
erik.breden@otterside.com

A Spring trip to China to photograph birds? During April and May the China coast provides a pathway for hundreds of thousands of migrants heading north to their breeding grounds in northern China, Japan, Mongolia, and Russia. Among these are over 35 species of Shorebirds or Waders (Sandpipers, Plovers, Curlews, Godwits, etc.), a few of which are quite rare. Shorebirds have been my passion for many years.

Most birdwatching tours will allow some time for participant photography, but the tour (including me) would eventually have to move on. This would not allow me to spend time with a particular bird or at a particular place if a good photographic opportunity presented itself.

I checked on the InterNet for alternatives to standard tours and found the China Wild Tour company, founded by a small group of dedicated Chinese birders. They offer standard and customized tours for birdwatching and photography, and also tours for other animals, and wilderness experiences in general. In addition, several of the founding members and guides are part of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force, which is working to save this endangered shorebird.

Who better to put together a custom photographic tour focusing on shorebirds (and Spring Migrants in general)? I contacted China Wild Tour and worked with them to plan a two week trip in the beginning of May. The itinerary was straightforward with two major locations:

Spend several days at the Nanhui Refuge southeast of Shanghai. Located on the coast of the East China Sea, this is an excellent migrant trap which has small wooded copses, farm fields, and fish pond impoundments, all with good access roads.
Then travel northwest from Nanhui about 150 miles (240 kilometers) to the Dongtai/Dafeng area. The tidal mudflats along the coast here host tens of thousands of shorebirds, including very small numbers of Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Nordmann's (Spotted) Greenshank, and Asian Dowitcher. The fish ponds, farm fields, and woodlands in this area also provide excellent habitat for migrants and breeding birds.

China Wild Tour provides local guides with spotting scopes, translators (if necessary), and local drivers. All food (good food, too!), lodging, and transportation within China is included in the tour price.

We live in the Rio Grande Valley in the southern tip of Texas, USA. We flew from Brownsville to Dallas, where we caught our flight to Shanghai. After spending a night at an airport hotel in Shanghai, China Wild Tour picked us up the next morning and we drove to the Nanhui Refuge. Then on to Dongtai, Dafeng, and finally back to the Shanghai airport hotel, where we caught our flight home the next day.

The trip involved three days of travel to and from China (two days going over because of that pesky International Dateline, and one day coming back). The tour was fourteen days, making for a total of seventeen days.

Finally, here is a summary of the numbers of species seen and photographed:

120 total bird species seen
49 new (life) bird species seen
34 total shorebird species seen
7 new (life) shorebird species seen
106 total bird species photographed (over 80% of the birds seen!)
54 new (life) bird species photographed
32 total shorebird species photographed
9 new (life) shorebird species photographed
over 5,600 total photographs taken!

See a brief discussion below of the different cameras (Nikon D7100 and Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless) and lenses I used.

So, how to organize the photos to tell the story? We divided them into the major categories of interest below. Scroll down until you see something you like.

Enjoy the trip...we sure did!

Erik and Mary Breden
Weslaco, Texas

The Trip - We have divided the non-bird photos into Sightseeing, Birding, and Dining

China Sightseeing

Click here to view images one-at-a-time, if you have a slow InterNet connection.

these are highlights of things we saw and places we went

Non-Avian and Birding Trip Highlights

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these are other animals and photos of our guides, translators, and us

Our Dining Experience in China

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these are photos of some of the wonderful meals we had with our guides and translators

The Birds - I have divided the birds I photographed into the following non-scientific categories based on the habitats where one can expect to see them:

Birds of the Forest and Fields

birds typically seen while driving through woodlands or along open fields

Birds of the Ponds and Waterways

birds typically seen on ponds, lakes, streams, tidal estuaries, etc., excluding shorebirds

Shorebirds (aka Waders)

strictly shorebirds, the main reason for the trip!

Birds of the the Forests and Fields

Click here to view images one-at-a-time, if you have a slow InterNet connection.

The Nanhui Refuge has small wooded areas along the roads in between the ponds and fields. These are great migrant traps, and we spent lots of time searching them. There were new birds to be found each day. Some arrived the night before and were resting and foraging when we got started in the morning, and others were often found after apparently arriving in the late afternoon.

While we waited for high tide on the mudflats at Dafeng (which occurred in the afternoons while we were there), we drove around through wooded areas. We stopped whenever we saw a bird, to look and take photos.

These are the birds I photographed:

Eurasian Blackbird
Chinese (Light-vented) Bulbul
Black-faced Bunting
Chestnut Bunting
Lesser Coucal
Eurasian Cuckoo
Oriental Cuckoo
Black-winged Cuckoo-Shrike
Spotted Dove
Oriental (Rufous) Turtle Dove
Black Drongo
Hair-crested (Spangled) Drongo
Asian Brown Flycatcher
Blue-and-White Flycatcher
Dark-sided Flycatcher
Gray-streaked Flycatcher
Japanese Paradise Flycatcher
Mugimaki Flycatcher
Narcissus Flycatcher
Yellow-rumped Flycatcher
Chinese (Yellow-billed) Grosbeak
Hoopoe
Azure-winged Magpie
Common (Eurasian) Magpie
Crested Myna

Reed Parrotbill
Vinous-throated Parrotbill
Pechora Pipit
Richard's Pipit
Plain Prinia
Brown Shrike
Long-tailed Shrike
Oriental Skylark
Eurasian Tree Sparrow
White-cheeked Starling
Siberian Stonechat
Blue Rock Thrush
Eyebrowed Thrush
Eastern Great Tit
Forest Wagtail
Gray Wagtail
White Wagtail
Eastern Yellow Wagtail
Korean (Manchurian) Bush Warbler
Oriental Reed Warbler
Eastern Crowned Warbler
Pale-legged Leaf Warbler
Yellow-browed Warbler
Arctic Warbler

Birds of the Ponds and Waterways

Click here to view images one-at-a-time, if you have a slow InterNet connection.

The Nanhui Refuge has large areas of open fields interspersed with fish ponds. We drove around these during the middle of the day.

In Dongtai and Dafeng we split our time between the wooded areas and areas of open fields and fishponds when we weren't out on the tidal mudflats.

These are the birds I photographed:

Eastern Cattle Egret
Intermediate Egret
Little egret
Swinhoe's (Chinese) Egret
Great Crested Grebe
Little Grebe
Black-headed Gull
Saunders's Gull
Chinese Pond Heron
Black-capped Kingfisher

Black-crowned Night-Heron
Osprey
Black-faced Spoonbill
Caspian Tern
Common Tern
Gull-billed Tern
Little Tern
Whiskered Tern
White-winged Tern

Shorebirds (aka Waders)

Click here to view images one-at-a-time, if you have a slow InterNet connection.

The highlight of the trip (for me at least) was finding, observing, and photographing all the various shorebirds migrating north to their breeding grounds. We saw 34 species, and I managed to photograph 32 of them, thanks to the tireless efforts of our guides and translators.

The tidal mudflats at Dafeng had the potential for the rarest birds (Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Nordmann's (Spotted) Greenshank, and Asian Dowitcher), but the multitude of fish ponds provided the best close-up photographic opportunities. We visited the tidal mudflats at Dafeng almost every afternoon at high tide, and birded the woods, fields, and the many fishponds at other times.

These are the birds I photographed:

Bar-tailed Godwit
Black-tailed Godwit
Eurasian Oystercatcher
Swinhoe's Snipe
Gray-headed Lapwing
Black-bellied (Gray) Plover
Pacific Golden-Plover
Kentish Plover
Lesser Sand (Mongolian) Plover
Little Ringed Plover
Common Greenshank
Nordmann's (Spotted) Greenshank
Common Redshank
Spotted Redshank
Marsh Sandpiper
Wood Sandpiper

Common Sandpiper
Terek Sandpiper
Dunlin
Great Knot
Red Knot
Sharp-tailed Sandpiper
Spoon-billed Sandpiper
Long-toed Stint
Sanderling
Red-necked Stint
Broad-billed Sandpiper
Gray-tailed Tattler
Ruddy Turnstone
Black-winged Stilt
Far Eastern Curlew
Whimbrel

Cameras and Lenses

This is the equipment I took:

2 Nikon D7100 DSLRs (1.5 magnification factor)
Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless Digital Camera (2.7 magnification factor)
Nikon FT1 Mount Adapter (to use Nikon AFS "F" mount lenses with the Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless)
Nikon AFS 80-400mm f4.5-f5.6 ED VR Zoom Lens
Nikon AFS 300mm f2.8G ED VR Fixed Lens
Nikon TC14E II (1.4x), TC17E II (1.7x), and TC20E III (2x) Teleconverters
Gitzo G1348 Carbon Fiber Tripod
Kirk "King Cobra" Gimbal Tripod Head

The Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless camera was of interest to me because it offered a 2.7 magnification factor versus the 1.5 factor of my Nikon D7100s. This is like adding a 1.8x teleconverter without degrading the lens optics. I tested it a little before the trip with mixed results. This uneven performance was also seen during the trip, but I did get some exceptional photos from it. Here are my observations:

I chose the V3 model because it comes with an electronic viewfinder in addition to the standard LCD display on the back of the camera.
The camera does well with a well lighted subject that has high contrast. A fast lens (like the 300mm f2.8) will usually provide more than enough light to focus.
It did not work well with distant subjects. The hybrid phase/contrast-detection auto-focusing seemed to need a subject that filled a good portion of the center of the frame.
When I added teleconverters to the 300mm f2.8 lens, the camera's focusing was less accurate.
I got mixed results with the Nikon 80-400mm lens, although I was often hand-holding this lens. With an EFL of 1080mm, hand holding did not work well for me. I did get good results when I used the lens in our vehicle with a bean bag window support.
I kept the ISO at 400. Going higher begins to introduce electronic "noise", which basically looks like the grain associated with a film image. It gets "grainy" very fast as you increase the ISO above 400!
Conclusion: the Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless camera will not replace your DSLR, but it is a good tool to have in your bag for those times when you need to get closer, but can't. With the FT1 adapter attached, it is about the size of a point-and-shoot camera with a telephoto zoom lens, so it can easily be carried in a pocket or the corner of your camera bag.

Below are sample photos taken with each lens. Please contact me if you have any comments or questions:

Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless photos taken with the Nikon AFS 80-400mm f4.5-f5.6 ED VR zoom lens with no teleconverter (EFL 1080mm). All except the Spoon-billed Sandpiper were taken from our vehicle using a bean bag window support.

Nikon 1 V3 Mirrorless photos taken with the Nikon AFS 300mm f2.8G ED VR fixed lens with no teleconverter (EFL 810mm). All were taken using a tripod, or from our vehicle using a bean bag window support.