Beijing in Sixty-Three Voices: Knowing the City's Birds by Ear
A magpie rattling from a hutong roof, a night heron croaking over a canal after dark, a hoopoe hooting softly on a park lawn: Beijing's birds announce themselves long before anyone sees them. That is also the question the capital's science museum has been putting to visitors this autumn — how many of these sounds do you actually know?
Sixty-three birds, four ways of living
“Birds of the Capital” (京华飞羽), a special exhibition at the China Science and Technology Museum running from 17 July to 30 October, is built with the Beijing Forestry University Museum under the guidance of the municipal forestry and parks bureau. It takes 63 of the city's common species and arranges them in four zones: urban neighbours, wetland spirits, forest residents and living together. Specimens and photographs carry the display; sound carries the argument.
The exhibition's opening questions are the ones any new listener faces: what are the birds around me called, how do their calls differ, and where does each of them live? It then asks for a game of listen — a wall of recordings behind questions like “how many bird sounds do you know?” — with the four-syllable cuckoo and the Mallard among the first voices on it.
Beijing is a good place to take that test. The city sits on a migration route and holds habitats most capitals have lost: reed-filled wetlands, canal margins, temple gardens, mountain forest on three sides. Its most famous bird is a swift — the Beijing Swift, the only wild migratory bird in the world named after the city. Its most misleading is the hoopoe, which plenty of people call a woodpecker.
Begin with six voices
Learning 63 species at once does not work. Six repeats will. Take one from each of the situations you actually walk through.
On the roof above you: the magpie. The Eurasian Magpie is the loudest reason to look up in a Chinese city. Its call is a hard, dry rattle, usually in a short run of three to five notes, and it is often answered by a second bird a street away. Once you know it, you will hear it on every block.
At your feet: the tree sparrow. Quieter and more constant than people expect. A flock in a hedge produces a roll of short, chattering notes with a slightly nasal edge — the background hum of courtyards and bus stops. Listen for the lack of pattern: sparrows chatter, they do not deliver phrases.
On the water: the Mallard. The female's descending quack series is the sound most people already know without naming it. In winter, ducks on a Beijing canal sort themselves by voice: Mallards quack, while the divers and pochards are mostly silent and leave a soft whistling or a low growl.
In the shallows: the grey heron. A tall, patient bird that sounds like a door hinge when it is disturbed. The call is a harsh, grating fraaank, often given in flight with the neck folded back. If a large bird lifts off a riverbank and makes that noise, you have your identification before it lands.
After dark: the night heron. Black-crowned Night Herons nest in city parks and fly out at dusk, and their call is a short, flat kwok that carries over water. Beijing birders joke about the species' unbothered expression and call it Master Night. The joke is worth remembering, because it is the sound most often mistaken for a frog.
And the one that is not a woodpecker. The hoopoe probes lawns and cracks with a long, down-curved bill, and its song is a soft, hollow hoop-hoop-hoop in loose threes — far gentler than the drumming it is blamed for. The exhibition makes the point directly: many visitors point at a hoopoe and say woodpecker.
What bills tell you about sound
The exhibition spends time on beaks and feet, and it is a useful habit for a listener. A short conical bill like a sparrow's cracks seeds and produces a chatter; the hoopoe's thin curved bill works soil and cracks, and its voice is correspondingly soft and low-volume; woodpeckers carry chisel bills, stiff tail props and barbed tongues, and their signature is percussion rather than song; raptors have hooked bills and talons and mostly keep quiet unless they are defending a nest. The shape of a bird's work explains the shape of its noise — which is why habitat, behaviour and sound are one clue, not three.
A month of practice
Pick one route — a park gate, a canal path, a stand of trees you pass daily — and walk it three mornings a week for a month. Note what you hear, when, and from which direction. Six voices will settle into memory faster than you expect, and the seventh will arrive on its own, as an interruption. When you want to see what a sound looks like, open any recording on this site and switch on the spectrogram.
The exhibition closes with a sentence worth keeping: every bird moving through the city is a witness to ecological health. From swifts over the old roofs to geese crossing on a winter night, legislation, research and fieldwork exist so that a child looking up will still see something flying.