Photographer captures rare Chinese mergansers
A rare series of high-definition pictures of scaly-sided mergansers preying on small striped fish went viral online recently. They were said to be the sharpest photographs of mergansers in Chongqing's Jiangjin district since the birds began wintering in a local river basin in 2012.
The scaly-sided merganser, also known as the Chinese merganser, is an endangered species under first-grade State protection and appears on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list.
"There are fewer of them than pandas," said 40-year-old Shen Bo, the photographer.
To capture pictures of the birds, Shen spent three winters in the wilderness of Jiangjin. In December last year, he waited for six days and finally snapped a few shots of them.
Shen is a brand designer in Chengdu, Sichuan province. He said that in his spare time he only photographs two kinds of birds — the Chinese merganser and the Chinese monal (Lophophorus lhuysii), which is also a protected species.
"As a Chinese, we must capture our native species well," Shen said, adding that he heard a story of a foreign photographer who came to western Sichuan for 11 years before finally capturing good photos of the endangered Chinese monal.
"There are a lot of shutterbugs in the country, but few can deliver really good photographs of the lovely birds," he said.
With a will to shoot something new, Shen has spent several hundred thousand yuan to improve his equipment in recent years.
On a recent trip to western Sichuan, he captured high-definition images of a stunning Chinese monal.
The scaly-sided merganser has a history of more than 10 million years. There are only about 1,000 of them. They spend the winter in China and eastern Russia, which are their main breeding grounds.
In China, the birds mostly live in the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin, northern Hebei province and the south side of the Yangtze River.
As Jiangjin district has made great progress on its ecological protection in recent years, local biodiversity, including the scaly-sided merganser is increasing. The Jiangjin section of Qihe River has become one of the biggest and winter habitats in southwestern China for the species.
