Tuesday, Day #6, Beth was playing hooky from the electronic music at the conference, so I took her to visit the New Summer Palace (the one the Empress Dowager Cixi built after the Old Summer Palace was destroyed by the British and French Allied Forces around 1860.) In the cab ride over I saw two more of my “White-winged Starlings” (that I suspected were Crested Mynas) but once again I didn’t see them long enough or well enough to be sure.
The Summer Palace itself is very pretty: lots of people, temples, and palaces. We didn’t see half of them. Not many birds though, despite the large lake. (Lakes and water features are usually surefire bird attractors, but in Beijing most water was shockingly bird free except at the Old Summer Palace. The only water birds we saw at the New Summer Palace were a few Mallards in the lagoon at Suzhou Street.) Aside from the ubiquitous Black-billed and Azure-winged Magpies, most of the birds were painted:
There was a Hall of Listening to Orioles (for opera, think “nightingale” in English) but we didn’t see or hear a single oriole the entire trip. :-(
We climbed up to the Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom, then walked down the back. There aren’t many hills in Beijing, and the emperors seemed fond of putting temples on top of the few hills they have. I don’t think we saw one hill the whole trip that didn’t have a temple on top.
Walking down the hill, we headed toward Suzhou Street. On the way I heard a really raucous cry. I’d heard this same cry the day before at The Temple of Heaven Park, but hadn’t been able to track the bird down. This time I got luckier. It was a Red-billed Blue Magpie! I only saw it briefly, and didn’t get a photo, but it was unmistakable. This is a really impressive bird. In fact, after finding it inside the field guide, I realized it was also the bird on the cover:
Suzhou Street was amusing, if more than a little touristy. Like the Great Wall, everyone was trying to sell us something in pidgin English. Beth did have fun playing Chinese flutes with a musician though. Apparently music qualifies as a universal language.
Walking back, some swallows were hawking for insects over the lake. Then I saw a genuine raptor, possibly a kestrel of some kind? It was gone too fast to tell. Almost immediately after, I saw two Mourning Doves fly over. It’s always good to check on familiar birds in unfamiliar locations, and on doing so I realized there are no Mourning Doves here. So what could they have been? Unfortunately there were several other possibilities, so all I could really say was that we’d seen two doves.
We caught a cab back to the conservatory, and ate lunch in the Rathskellar (not its real name, but close enough in spirit). Fish hotpot again. Beth went to the conference and I took a nap until it was time to get ready for the closing concert.
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