Sixteen St. Johnians and their family members (age from 2.5 years old to 80 years old) went together on Sunday, 13th March 2005, to Mai Po Nature Reserve to see the largest wetland of HK. Unfortunately as the temperature suddenly droped to less than 10 degrees over the weekend, there were about 10 participants who had enrolled with their family members could not join the expedition.
Dr. Steve Cheung was our tour guide who is also a very experienced “bird watcher”. With a strong Leica monocular, Steve led the team pass through the “Gei Wei ” see the map on the right – and then penetrate through the “mangrove”. There was a long floating bridge in the mangrove where we walked carefully with great excitement. After about an hour later, we arrived at the bird view cottage at the outskirt of Mai Po facing the Deep Bay (Mudflat).
It was really an eye-opening for us when we saw thousands and thousands of birds – avocets, grey herons, little egrets, black-faced spoonbills, cormorants and even pelicans. Most of these birds were flying to Hong Kong from the north, like Northern China and even Korea to spend the winter here. Some of them might be transiting in HK and carried on with their journey to the south. After seeing the birds in the view cottage for 45 minutes, we headed back to the WWF centre taking the north Gei Wai path. But still we needed to pass through the exciting floating bridge.
We would like here to thank Dr. Steve Cheung and Darryl Fung for orangising such a meaningful event. All of us really had a great time in Mai Po and we hope that we could be back there agian in this summer to catch the – Gei Wai Shrimps in Mai Po.
(If you want to see more pictures of this adventure, please visit the forum).
SJCAA
