Dongting Lake

Overview

About

The Yueyang Tower–Dongting Lake scenic area in Yueyang, Hunan, has nine parts including the old town and tower, Junshan, South Lake, Bajiao Lake, the Miluo River, the Tieshan reservoir, Fushou Mountain and Huanggai Lake, over 1,300 km² in all.

It is part of the Yueyang Tower–Dongting Lake scenic area, in the second batch of national parks of China (national scenic areas) named by the State Council in 1988.

Travel tips

Yueyang Tower: it stands outside the west gate of the old city right on Dongting Lake and is one of the three famous towers south of the Yangtze, made known by Fan Zhongyan's essay. Climbing it gives a lake view, best in late afternoon and at sunset.

Bird watching: from November to March migratory birds winter on East Dongting Lake. You can watch from the edge of the reserve, and some areas are restricted.

Season: spring and autumn are best. Summer, June to August, is flood season, with a wide lake but hot weather. In winter the water is low and the flats are exposed, the time for birds.

Dongting Lake

Dongting Lake in northern Hunan, about 2,600 km², is China’s second largest freshwater lake. It joins the Yangtze to the north and receives Hunan’s four great rivers, the Xiang, Zi, Yuan and Li, from the south.

Birds of Dongting

In 2008 experts from China, Britain, Denmark and Australia jointly surveyed 21 important wintering sites in the lake’s four wetland reserves, more than 40 experts and monitors in ten teams using line and point counts with uniform methods and forms, the largest simultaneous waterbird count ever made at Dongting.

The survey showed how much wintering waterbirds depend on the lake: 49 species and about 110,000 birds, eight species above the 1% international threshold: great cormorant, Bewick’s swan, falcated duck, greater and lesser white-fronted geese, bean goose, common crane and avocet. The lesser white-fronted geese were about 60% of the world’s wintering population, falcated ducks over 40%, avocets over 27% and bean geese over 20%.

The survey and monitoring during the winter freeze showed that with much of the lake iced over, open water for ducks shrank to the channels where the current kept flowing, and diving ducks such as the tufted duck, which need deep water, fell by more than 90%.

“More worrying, some birds could not be found at all,” said Jiang Yong, deputy director of the East Dongting national nature reserve. Black-headed gulls, once seen everywhere in winter at 3,000 to 10,000, were not found at all; more than five once widespread species of plovers and sandpipers were missing; and the endangered black stork, whose Dongting wintering flock was once about 30% of its eastern population, was not seen.

Lakes such as Jiaxing and the Qingshan polder and many outlying lakes that once held concentrations of birds had few wintering waterbirds this time, because of drought, conversion to reed farms and poplar plantations, and draining of enclosed waters to catch wintering fish, all of which have sharply reduced their value for birds.

Other poems

Li Bai and Liu Yuxi both wrote of the calm lake as a mirror with Junshan in it; Liu Yuxi likened the island to a green snail on a silver plate.

Nearby

Straight-line distances. Search nearby