endangered animals

More than 1,000 people in China have signed a petition calling for the cancellation of a plan to build a dam on Poyang Lake, the country’s largest freshwater lake.  The people said the dam would take a significant toll on endangered migratory birds and threaten the rare Yangtze finless porpoise.  In an open letter to authorities in the Jiangxi province last week, Let Birds Fly, a Hangzhou-based environmental group, said it would be “extremely irresponsible” of the government to approve Poyang Lake project. “It goes against China’s efforts of to conserve the environment … It would do irreversible [damage] to our ecosystem,” the signatories said in the letter. The letter came after the govern

Pangolins continue to face the threat of extinction despite tightened protections on the wildlife trade put in place by China and many Southeast Asian countries. During the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity on September 30, 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson drew attention to the plight of the scaly mammal in a call for more action to save the species.

A rare sighting of a Steller sea lion was reported at Dandong port on the coast of China’s northeastern province of Liaoning on July 13, 2020. The animals are usually more active in the northern Pacific Ocean, but several have recently been seen in China. Listed as “near threatened” by conservation groups, the creatures are the largest species in the sea lion family.  

Customs officials in Hong Kong have made their largest ever shark fin seizure, uncovering 28.7 tons taken from 38,500 endangered sharks inside a pair of shipping containers from South America, the city’s authorities said. The two consignments, worth $1.1 million, more than doubled the combined hauls of shark fin seized in all of 2019, according to Hong Kong’s customs department. Assistant superintendent Danny Cheung Kwok-yin of the agency said both consignments were sent from the same shipper to the same Hong Kong logistics company. Customs officers have arrested the owner of the logistics firm, but the 57-year-old man has been granted bail pending further investigation. A law enforcement so

Turtle soup, rice porridge with frog, snake soup, frog leg clay pot rice – could popular dishes in Chinese cuisine like these be off restaurant menus in China for good? That’s the worry of chefs, food critics and restaurant owners after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top lawmaking body, banned the trade and consumption of wild animals in late February as part of measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak. The consumption of wild animals has drawn much government scrutiny, as both the current epidemic and the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) have been associated with markets in China selling meat from wild animals. The Sars virus o

Should you ever encounter a tiger in Hong Kong, run downhill. The big cat’s front legs are shorter than its hind limbs, its descent will be awkward and give you the edge as you escape. But since the last sightings of the South China tiger in Hong Kong were in the 1970s, that’s unlikely to be necessary. Villagers minding livestock or cutting grass on hillsides, however, would likely have grown up heeding that advice passed down from older generations. Author and graphic designer John Saeki learned about this from a friend whose mother is an elderly villager in Hong Kong’s northeastern New Territories. His friend’s mother had once seen a partially devoured calf, presumably the result of a tige

The number of endangered golden snub-nosed monkeys is on the rebound in central China, according to a recent census at the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve in Hubei province. Researchers found that over the past 15 years, the monkey population increased by 189 to 1,471 in the 80 square miles of habitat the animals occupy in the park.

Two endangered finless porpoises have been found dead in China in the space of a week, according to media reports. Both were found dead in different parts of the Yangtze River, China’s longest. One body was found in Jiayu county, which is located in the central Chinese province of Hubei, on Monday.  Four days before that, the remains of another porpoise were recovered from Dongting Lake, a large flood basin of the Yangtze River, in Hunan province in central China, news website Thepaper.cn reported. China’s finless porpoises are classified as extremely endangered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Last year, vice-minister Yu Kangzhen said surveys showed there were 1,012 of the

Rare white lion twins were born at Jinan Wildlife Park in China’s eastern province of Shandong. The twins, one boy and one girl, were born in good health. The twin cubs came into the world the day after the country’s National Day celebrations. The park has three adult white lions in addition to the twins.

One of the world’s rarest turtle species moved a step closer to extinction with the death of the last known female of the kind in eastern China over the weekend. The turtle, named Xiangxiang, was the last female Yangtze giant softshell turtle in China. Her death left just three others of the species in the world – a century-old male in the same Chinese zoo in the eastern city of Suzhou and two others of unknown sex in the wild in Vietnam, Suzhou Daily reported. The Yangtze giant softshell turtle is one of the world’s biggest and rarest freshwater turtles. Native to China, the species once thrived along the Yangtze River and in the Red River basin of northern Vietnam. But the number of Yangtz