Ergun, Inner Mongolia: My first scuba diving trip was fraught with worry as the frigid water and pressure were painful to my ears.

Another pastime of mine is fishing, but recently the only thing I've caught is a dose of disappointment.

Recently though I have taken up another hobby, one where neither physical pain nor emotional setback is an issue. My new venture - bird-watching. A whole new world of surprise and beauty has opened up, and not forgetting the most important factor of all, the joy of discovery.

First class

My first step into the world of bird-watching was a one-week trip to Ergun, the northernmost part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, two weeks ago.

Our tour group, organized by Green Earth, a Chinese environmental conservation NGO based in Beijing, included a team of five bird-watching enthusiasts.

Led by Zhang Lin, an environmental activist with the NGO, they planned to count birds throughout the trip and compile a field report afterwards.

"No work of this kind has been done in this part of the country," she said. "We hope our observation records can be beneficial for both bird-watchers and researchers."

My nice binoculars and a copy of "A Field Guide to the Birds of China" endeared me to the group on the train from Beijing to Inner Mongolia. On it, I had my first bird watching class.

They gave me a list on which were the names of over 250 birds. Zhang told me that they are all birds known to live in Inner Mongolia and may appear before my eyes at any moment.

"Try to become familiar with these names and pictures by using your guidebook," she said. "So if a bird appears, you can tell which species it is more quickly."

Is this possible, just by reading the book? Though I was full of doubts about my own ability, I checked the names of birds and their portraits in the book one by one, till my head was packed with them and they were all jumbled together.

Water rail?

If I have one ability that would make me a good bird watcher it's my sharp eyes.

On the way from Hailar, the northernmost major town in Inner Mongolia, to the city of Ergun, I was gazing out of the bus window and saw a hen-sized bird standing just a few meters away from the highway on the grasslands. With a long red bill, lanky red legs and a lengthy neck, the brown-bodied bird looked slim and tall.

As I wasn't sitting close to any member of our bird-watching team, I had to wait until the bus arrived in Ergun to let them know of the sighting. As it turned out I was the only one to spy the skinny squawker, everyone else had missed it.

They asked me whether it was an ibis or a crane. I was sure it was neither as I was familiar with both these birds.

"It sounds like a rail," one of the team mates said. They checked the guidebook, turned to the page of rails, and ask me to point out the one I saw.

I pointed to the water rail, which turns out frequents Ergun in the summer.

"But the water rail is truly shy and rare, usually seen closer to water," said Zhang Lin. "How come it was standing boldly in the grassland and so close to the road?"

She suggested the bird be recorded as a suspect finding. I wasn't going to argue, for even I had no confidence in my sighting.

Common buzzard

We arrived at Ergun in the late afternoon. After dinner the sun was yet to set so we set off for the city's heat and power plant as the locals had informed us that it was a great area for spotting birds.

It was about a 20-minute walk from the town center. Near the entrance of the plant with a towering chimney, the tallest structure in the small town, is a pond with a thick growth of reeds and grass. There we saw several species of birds.

White wagtails, grey wagtails, common terns, common sandpiper, green sandpiper, fork-tailed swift, ruddy shelduck...

Though all of them are common birds my teammates had seen before, they were new and exciting to me.

Passing the pond and walking on an embankment crossing a stretch of grassland near the plant, we saw three more ponds, two streams and several more species.

Our findings on the short trip gave us hope for great discoveries in the coming days.

The following day we hired two jeeps and left town at the crack of dawn.

We headed for Xiaogushan Wetlands, a stretch of wilderness created by a tributary of the Ergun River about 40 kilometers west of the town.

The landscape along the route was spectacular. But I was here for the birds, not the stunning vistas.

On the way we recorded several species of birds, including two common buzzards and a northern lapwing.

The beautiful lapwing was the first bird I became familiar with through Ergun, due to its sad call of "peewit", its tumbling flight and especially its long wispy crest, which is conspicuous and easy to spot.

At the Xiaogushan Wetlands, however, we were disappointed as the myriad species we were expecting didn't materialize. There were hundreds of fork-tailed swifts darting through the sky but this didn't make up for the lack of diversity.

"It's probably because the river is too clean and running too fast," said Qiao Yingqing, a member of our team.

Returning from Xiaogushan we saw a young common buzzard. It had been caught by a local driver. Looking a bit worse for wear, the buzzard with rounded head and brown plumage could not even fly away after we pleaded with the driver for its freedom.

So the man put the poor bird of prey back into the car and left. It might become a meal of dogs later, said one of our drivers.

Because of this depressing encounter, the common buzzard has become another bird that is lodged in my memory.

Forest birds

We joined a big group in the afternoon and headed for the Mo'erdaoga Forest Park along the Ergun River, which is one of the boundary rivers between China and Russia.

Though the wetlands cut through by the river are vast and beautiful, there were not many birds around similar with those seen at the Xiaogushan Wetlands.

After a day off due to heavy showers, we woke up early at the Bailudao Villa, a scenic spot within the parks and hiked into the depth of the nearby forests in search of birds.

It was here I discovered that forest birds are usually much smaller and faster than water birds or birds of prey and hence hard to find and even harder to distinguish. I felt lost in the woods, all the time hearing chirping and seeing darting shadows of different birds.

I admit, I could tell they were different through my binoculars. But that was all!

Fortunately my teammates were much better. Sometimes they can tell a bird's species just by listening.

They managed to identify over 20 species of birds in the forests including a great spotted woodpecker, many long-tailed tits and marsh tits, a yellow-browed warbler and an Eurasian nuthatch, and that was just in three hours.

They always tried to catch the birds with the telescope to give me a chance to see them up close. So I was able to watch the nuthatch feeding on the trunk of a pine tree up close and personal.

They are the only kind of bird able to climb not only up trees but also down them headfirst. They look chunky and cute with a grey back and white belly.

Pied harrier

On the way back to the town, we passed the steppe cut through by the Genghe River.

At a big stretch of wheat field bordered by woods and the road our patience was rewarded with a male pied harrier's spectacular aerial display.

The medium-sized black-and-white-coloured hawk, with slim body, long wings and long tail, was slowly searching the field and open ground between the field and the woods for small animals and birds.

He hovered, glided, turned around and made a stop over the wheat field. The wheat was bending, surrendering to the force of the wind. From a distance, the harrier looked like a seagull dancing above surging waves.

He was hunting alone. We saw two flocks of dove-like birds scattered by the bird of prey. His hunt was fruitless that day though his aerial acrobatics were sublime.

Back at Ergun, we returned to the wetlands near the heat and power plant in the evening and recorded a dozen new species within two hours.

We were amazed by the high density and rich diversity of birds living on the plot of waste land and decided to target our bird survey on the area.

Isabelline wheatear

It turned out to be a good decision. Around the heat and power plant, we found over half of our nearly 80 findings.

Almost every time we went to the area with four ponds separated by the embankment, we saw new species which we had failed to find in the other parts of Ergun.

A northern goshawk, two couples of northern wheatears, three grey herons, four species of ducks, several species of sandpipers...

My teammates spent quite a lot of time distinguishing a dozen species of waders, plovers, sandpipers, snipes, godwits and stints, from each other. I almost gave up the effort.

For these shorebirds, usually with long wings, legs and necks, have similar plumage patterns - mottled browns and greys above, with paler underparts sometimes with streaks and spots. They look too similar and are definitely confusing to a beginner like me.

Sometimes I felt I had a grasp of it until they mixed with another species and once again I was lost.

Tired of my inability to distinguish between the shore birds I wandered to the opposite end of the embankment one afternoon.

Suddenly I came across a couple of small birds on the rocks used to strengthen the bank, one jumping, another standing still.

Using my binoculars, I found that they were a couple of sandy birds with black tails and of a species I had never before seen.

When I tried to get closer they darted off and began chirping, they must have been warning me off their territory.

So I stood still and gestured to my teammates. They finally arrived and identified the birds as Isabelline wheatear, a quite unique species in this area which none of them had seen before.

At the end of our trip, I had found something "truly special," as Zhang Lin said.

Our worry

Although our findings were encouraging we were concerned about the future of the wetlands near the plant.

It is too close to the city and therefore liable to fall prey to urban expansion. The ponds are quite small and would be easily filled. And the area isn't aesthetically pleasing enough to preclude it from developers' plans. "It could be changed by a goodwill city clean-up campaign," said Zhang Lin.

So she said that she would send a copy of our field report to the local government and "hope the local people become aware of the uniqueness of their wetlands."

(China Daily August 16, 2004)