Healthy ecosystems buzz with dragonflies

For Zhang Shuren, 78, who took his 10-year-old grandson to the Peking Insect Museum recently, dragonflies are inseparable from his memories of old Beijing.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, he spent summer afternoons near ponds, canals and patches of open land, chasing dragonflies with other children.

"Back then, you didn't go somewhere specifically to look for them," he said. "They were just there."

The children sometimes used insect nets, but catching a dragonfly with their bare hands was more difficult. "You had to wait for it to land and move slowly," Zhang recalled. "If you rushed, it was gone."

Over the decades, however, he began seeing fewer dragonflies as Beijing's cityscape changed and natural spaces disappeared.

"That was when I realized that some things you take for granted can disappear," he said.

Now, when Zhang spots a dragonfly above a park pond, he always stops to watch.

"For children today, it may just be a beautiful insect," he said. "For me, it brings back an entire summer."

The museum in Fengtai district, which opened in April, has more than 20,000 insect specimens as well as living insects and hands-on activities for visitors.

Feng Ruochen, a 36-year-old Beijing native and co-founder and director of the museum, remembers when catching insects was simply what children did for fun.

Growing up in Beijing, Feng spent summer afternoons along the North Moat in Andingmen subdistrict, where dragonflies seemed to be everywhere. Children waited for them to land or swung insect nets through the air, competing with each other to catch one.

As Beijing expanded, natural spaces gave way to roads, buildings and other urban infrastructure. Waterways deteriorated, while pesticides used in landscaping affected insects both in the water and on land.

The dragonflies of Feng's childhood became harder to find, but in recent years — in places like the Liangshui River in southern Beijing — healthy populations of the insect now abound.

For years it was notorious for being heavily polluted, but following water treatment and environmental restoration, the river and its surrounding landscape have been transformed.

Green space now runs alongside parts of the waterway. And with the return of suitable habitats, wildlife has begun to reappear. "Dragonflies have come back in large numbers," Feng said, adding fish, frogs, beetles and birds have also become more common.

"When you restore the environment, it is not just one species that comes back," he said. "The whole ecosystem begins to recover."