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Since 1983, Zheng Guangmei has lived in a hut seven months out of the year at the Wuyanling Nature Reserve in East China's Zhejiang Province.

Zheng, a Beijing Normal University professor, goes there to observe the yellow-bellied tragopan, an endangered species of bird.

Zheng and his students take turns watching a nest on a nearby tree 24 hours a day.

The academic name for the bird is guangxiensis. It has a black head surrounded by yellow-orange orbital skin. It also has a red-orange crest.

Zheng and his students first found a nest in April 1983 after two months of looking. They studied it from 4 am to 7 pm each day.

"But on the morning of the seventh day, we approached the nest, turned the torch on, and suddenly the bird flew away," Zheng said. "A brooding bird should never fly away. At the foot of the tree we saw broken eggs. Some bird or animal must have visited the nest the night before and harmed it."

The second nest Zheng and his students observed leaked at night. One morning, they saw three eggs lying on the ground, one of them broken. They returned the two remaining eggs to the nest and added a chicken's egg.

"This time the bird brooded for 56 days, double the usual period, but still nothing came out. The eggs must have been frozen at night," Zheng said. "On the 56th day I climbed to the nest and tried to drive the bird away, but it sang in a strange voice, like a hurt cat, and pecked my hand when I touched the nest."

From then on, Zheng and his student Zhang Zhengwang guarded the nest 24 hours a day.

They also brought two pairs of the birds to Beijing Normal University. Today, the university nurses more than 120 such birds.

Zheng's research is only a tiny part of conservation efforts that Chinese ornithologists have made in the last two decades.

Zheng and his students are among the ornithologists in China who have spent years in deep forests, searching for birds and observing their behavior. They have researched birds' ecology, fossils and classification.

"China is playing an increasingly important role in world ornithological research and bird protection," said Xu Weishu, secretary general of the 23rd World Ornithological Congress in Beijing.

The congress, also known as the Olympics for bird lovers, kicked off on Monday at the Beijing International Convention Center.

Xu said it was the first time China had hosted the event, which has been held every four years since 1884.

The one-week convention was organized by the China Ornithological Committee and was sponsored by Beijing Normal University and the Swarovski Optik, China Committee for International Union of Biological Science.

"There are 186 endangered species of birds in China, and 1,000 in the world," Zheng said. "They had better be conserved in the wild. If they are brought to laboratories, they will find it very difficult to adapt to life in the wild again."

Zheng presented to the congress his new work, "Wild Birds in China," co-authored by Zhang Cizu.

Besides striving to protect living birds, Chinese scientists are also known for their discovery of and studies of fossil birds.

At the congress, Zhou Zhonghe, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discussed a major achievement Chinese paleontologists have made in their study of the Mesozoic fossil birds discovered in China.

The amount of prehistoric bird fossils discovered in China ranks No 1 in the world, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Following the discovery of the Gansu Bird in Yumen in Northwest China's Gansu Province by Hou Lianhai in 1984, a large amount of bird fossils that can be traced to the Mesozoic Era more than 100 million years ago have been found in the western region of Northeast China's Liaoning Province.

"Chinese bird fossils have become so important that every ornithologist dreams of getting one," said Larry Martin, a University of Kansas professor.

Martin and Paul Sereno, developers of two opposing theories on the origin of birds, debated during one of 40 symposiums at the congress.

"Paul believes birds came from dinosaurs, so when you go to the garden and feed your chicken, you are actually feeding a dinosaur," Martin joked. "But I believe birds are older than dinosaurs.

"Our problem can only be solved here. China has deposits of the right kind and age to find the first birds, but I don't think they have found them yet."

The importance of Chinese bird fossils has resulted in their illegal outflow.

Hou Lianhai, a member of the congress' organization committee and an ornithologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, once appealed to scientists to refuse to do research on smuggled fossils and thus help stop the smuggling.

Foreign news agencies claim a piece of the Confuciusornis fossil could sell for up to 30,000 yuan (US$3,600).

About 80 percent of the 1,000 Confuciusornis unearthed to date has been leaked in such a way to international studies and collections.

The altruistic goal of all Chinese ornithologists is to protect the birds, Zheng Guangmei said.

To raise public awareness, China declares one week a year "Love Birds Week."

And an article in the Chinese language magazine "Man and Nature," urges people not to catch or cage wild birds.

Zheng said the public is increasingly enthusiastic about wildlife protection, but only pandas and other large animals.

Another hindrance in the conservation efforts is the loopholes in the law.

"The court cannot find the appropriate law under which to sentence an illegal hunter," Zheng said. "And the forest police may not be able to tell one species of birds from another.

"This means we cannot possibly protect all species of birds, so we must work harder to teach the public about conservation," the ornithologist said.

(China Daily August 16, 2002)