Six Million Waterbirds: What China's Winter Count Found
Every January, China counts its winter waterbirds on the same days, at the same 876 monitoring units, from the Yarlung Tsangpo valley to the Yellow River delta. The count run between 5 and 15 January 2026, across all 31 provincial-level regions, produced the largest total in the survey's history: 6.324 million waterbirds of 167 species.
That is 158.9% more than the 2.443 million birds recorded in the same survey a decade earlier, in 2016 — a rise that reflects both recovering populations and a monitoring network that now reaches further into the country's wetlands. The figures were released by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration at a press conference on this year's bird protection results, where the head of its wildlife protection department, Wang Weisheng, set out what the numbers mean.
Where the birds are
Most of them are inside protected areas. Of the 167 species counted, 157 — 5.171 million individuals, or 94.0% of species and 81.8% of birds — were recorded wintering within the protected-area system, which is as clear a signal as any that reserve building changes outcomes for waterbirds.
The three most important wintering grounds have held their places for three years running: Poyang Lake in Jiangxi, the Dongting Lake wetlands in Hunan, and the middle reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. Two new sites moved into the top five this winter — the Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve in Shandong, and the riverside wetlands around Anqing in Anhui.
What is recovering
Nineteen nationally protected species are stable or increasing, among them the Crested Ibis, Black-faced Spoonbill, Relict Gull, Saunders's Gull, Black Grouse, Brown Eared Pheasant, Grey Peacock-Pheasant and Great Hornbill.
Three numbers stand out. In the 2025 synchronized winter count, China recorded 2,555 Baer's Pochards — more than double the roughly 1,000 birds found in 2012, for a diving duck that was once among the rarest in the world. The Blue-crowned Laughingthrush, a Chinese endemic, rose from about 550 birds in 2024 to roughly 660. And the Green Peafowl now numbers more than 1,000.
The framework behind those figures is deliberate: 1,140 important habitats along the flyways have been identified, of which 821 key sites are singled out for protection and restoration, with monitoring networks built over them. Fourteen species — including the Crested Ibis, Green Peafowl and Red-crowned Crane — were placed on the 14th Five-Year Plan's rescue list; 21 more, among them the Baer's Pochard and the Oriental White Stork, have been added for the 15th.
China holds 1,505 bird species, about one sixth of the world's total, and more than 800 of them are migratory. Four of the world's nine major flyways cross the country, covering almost all of its land and territorial waters — which is why a Chinese winter count is also an international measurement.
The unexpected records
The most interesting part of a synchronized count is what turns up where it should not. This winter's survey logged a Red-breasted Goose in Jinchang, Gansu, and in Markit, Xinjiang; a White-browed Crake in both Sanya, Hainan and Mengzi, Yunnan; an Aleutian Tern at the Beilun Estuary reserve in Guangxi; a Glaucous Gull at Jinzhou in Liaoning; Slender-billed Gulls at Qionghai in Sichuan and at Dianchi in Yunnan; a White-eared Night Heron in Mingxi, Fujian; and a Black Bittern at the Haiwei wetland park in Changjiang, Hainan.
Two records pushed a boundary. On the Leizhou Peninsula in western Guangdong, surveyors found both a Scaly-sided Merganser and a Relict Gull — the southernmost records of either species on the Chinese mainland.
How to hear a count
Numbers like these are abstract until you stand beside the water in January. Winter is the season when a wetland's population is at its most audible: geese and cranes call in flight, ducks whistle and quack in the shallows, and the same six or seven voices repeat across thousands of kilometres of coastline. Learn those few first, and a count stops being a statistic and becomes something you can hear.
One thing the survey cannot measure is how many birds were never found. A synchronized count is a snapshot taken by people standing in the same places on the same days, and its value lies in the repetition: the same method, year after year, is what turns 2.4 million into 6.3 million and makes the change real.