Stubborn fire at Chinese reserve destroys habitat of rare crane
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
October 23, 2001
BEIJING--Fires have burned in a northern Chinese nature reserve for almost two months, consuming thousands of acres of parched marshlands that are home to a rare bird, a park management official said Monday.
Record low rainfalls and the draining of waters for agriculture have left the Zhalong Natural Reserve tinder-dry, said the official, who gave his surname, Pang.
Fires that started in reedbeds on Aug. 27 spread across 33,000 acres of marsh, Pang said. Hundreds more acres of grasslands are also burning, he said, confirming reports in Chinese newspapers.
"It's very difficult to extinguish the fire due to the vast area hit," he said in a telephone interview.
The fires caused heavy losses for local residents who harvest and sell reeds for a living, he added.
The Zhalong reserve, in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, lies along a key migration route for birds. It hosts one of the few remaining populations of red-crested cranes, also known as Manchurian or Japanese cranes.
Pang said most of the roughly 200 cranes thought to live at Zhalong fled the fires and were unhurt.
The birds are native to eastern Siberia, China, Japan and Korea. As few as 2,000 survive in the wild, making them the world's second most endangered species of crane, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association says.
Heilongjiang's 6.67 million acres of wetlands are about 11 percent of China's total.
Yet Zhalong has been under threat for years from farmers draining wetlands for crops. Much of northeast China suffered a record drought over the past year, worsened by the farming of grasslands and natural terrain.