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Port of Call |
LAST UPDATE May 30, 2008
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| January 17, 2008 |
Hong Kong – Visiting the Mai Po Nature Reserve and a local fishing
community: A different Hong Kong |
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| Marshlands in the New Territories feel drastically different from the nearby financial district of Central Hong Kong. |
The Peace Boat made its first port of call on the 60th Global Voyage to the buzzing urban metropolis of Hong Kong on January 17. While many participants toured the city center, sampling exotic international foods and exploring the jungle of skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island, a group of Peace Boat participants chose to travel north into the New Territories to visit a fishing village and the Mai Po Marshes Nature Reserve. |
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Peace Boat participants pull in fish nets during a harvesting activity in a pond managed by the Green Fishpond Project, which raises green carp, big head carp, and grey mullet. |
During a visit to the Tai Sang Wai fishery, participants enjoyed a harvesting activity using a traditional net-fishing technique. Many Japanese participants commented that it reminded them of fishing in their younger days, and while pulling in the nets began to sing the Japanese song “Soran Bushi,” a traditional Japanese fishing song. Participants also learned about the Green Fishpond Project, developed in coordination with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) of Hong Kong to create a sustainable fish raising system that functions in harmony with the conservation efforts of the nearby Mai Po Nature Reserve. |
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| Touring the many different inter-tidal Gei Wai ponds |
From the fishery, the tour headed to the Mai Po Nature Reserve to learn about efforts to preserve nature in Hong Kong, and to tour the marshlands while learning about indigenous flora and fauna. Mai Po is a marshland area that nurtures a rich ecosystem home to a plethora of wildlife, managed by the WWF of Hong Kong since 1984. The WWF of Hong Kong hopes to preserve a wildlife habitat in which native species of birds can live symbiotically with human communities nearby. Over 68,000 water birds are known to winter in the Mai Po Nature Reserve, and an additional 20 to 30,000 shorebirds pass through on their spring and fall migrations. The WWF maintains a system of sluice gates to adjust the water levels in the marshlands to create suitable habitats for these migratory birds that visit in different seasons. Some of the birds participants were lucky enough to see included the spotted dove, cormorant, black-faced spoonbill, eurasian pintail, and various species of heron, egret and kingfisher, amongst many more. |
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| The Mai Po Nature Reserve acts as a habitat for a variety of flora and fauna, such as this water lily. |
Mai Po and nearby Inner Deep Bay were registered together as a protected wetland site in 1995 by the Ramsar Convention of Wetlands, an organization that promotes the environmental protection of important wetlands, especially as waterfowl habitat. The Ramsar Convention, first established in 1971 in Iran, has now registered more than 1700 sites around the world. The convention promotes “the wise use of all wetlands … as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development throughout the world.” |
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Some participants sighted the endangered Black-faced Spoonbill in the Mai Po mudflats. Over 300 of the remaining 1400 Black-faced Spoonbills in the world winter in the Mai Po and Deep Bay wetlands. |
Unfortunately, urbanization threatens to destroy the precious marshlands in Hong Kong. Many of the mudflats and fishponds have been reclaimed for development, and pollution from surrounding farms and residential areas has severely worsened the water quality of Inner Deep Bay. Discharged sediment from construction projects has led to a build-up of silt on the coastal mudflats, raising their height and initiating a transition into dry land in some areas. While migratory birds were commonly first seen in October each year, in recent years the birds have been arriving in September, a change the WWF attributes to global warming. Both local and global factors threaten wetlands like Mai Po, and participants on this tour were challenged to consider the implications of human development on the environment, and what they could be more conscious of in their lives. |
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A common visitor to the mudflats, the Great Egret is one of over 350 species of migratory birds, 12 of which are globally endangered, that winter in the Mai Po and Inner Deep Bay wetlands. |
You can learn more about the Mai Po Nature Reserve under management by the WWF of Hong Kong at: www.wwf.org.hk |
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