"Giant panda among birds" group expansion story
People's Political Consultative Conference, Sichuan, June 3 (Reporter Wang Shuo) The vast Giant Panda National Park is not only a paradise for the national treasure giant pandas, but also a fertile sanctuary for thousands of rare animals and plants. The green-tailed pheasant, known as the "giant panda among birds", is one of them.
The Green-tailed Pheasant is a rare bird unique to my country, and it is also the most realistic prototype of the "Green Luan" in the ancient legend. The male adult bird is dressed in gorgeous feathers, and its wings are shining with colorful metallic luster, just like a rainbow falling in the mountains, so it is poetically called "Shushan Rainbow" by the local people. Because of its sparse population in the wild and extreme difficulty in survival and reproduction, it is not only listed as a national first-level protected animal, but also included in the "International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Endangered Species". It is as rare as the giant panda, so it is named the "Giant Panda among Birds."
In the Fengtongzhai National Nature Reserve in Sichuan, there is the Sichuan Baoxing Green-tailed Pheasant Conservation Research Center. Relying on the scientific research strength of West China Normal University, a doctoral studio will be established here in 2022 to create a systematic and professional protection research platform tailored for the Green-tailed Pheasant, laying a solid foundation for scientific research for the survival and reproduction of this endangered species.
For a long time, artificial breeding of green-tailed pheasants has been recognized as a worldwide problem. Difficulties in fertilization, hatching, and survival of young birds have affected the recovery and growth of the population. Starting from the rescue of a few wild green-tailed pheasants in 1992, over the past decades, generations of scientific researchers have gradually carried out artificial breeding research. They took root in the mountains, studied with concentration, and finally broke through the technical bottleneck.
Data show that in 2017, there were only 11 artificially bred green-tailed pheasants left in the world; today, the artificial population has steadily climbed to about 30. As the breeding technology matures, the hatching success rate of fertilized eggs is nearly 100%, and the survival rate of young birds has remained stable at more than 80%. What is even more gratifying is that the scientific research team successfully bred four generations of individuals, creating the world's only self-sustaining artificial population of green-tailed pheasants, injecting strong vitality into the continuation of the species.
At the same time, thanks to the systematic ecological construction of the Giant Panda National Park, the habitat integrity of the green-tailed pheasant continues to be optimized, and the supporting scientific research monitoring and protection systems are increasingly improved to protect the population recovery.
However, despite a series of achievements, new challenges still need to be solved. According to Chen Li, head of the Green-tailed Pheasant Conservation and Research Center in Baoxing, Sichuan, green-tailed pheasants currently raised in artificial environments generally lack natural mating and courtship experience, resulting in large fluctuations in their natural mating success rates. Currently, the doctoral studio of the research center is increasing its natural mating success rate through intervention methods such as video observation and learning, scientific artificial stimulation, in order to establish a scientific training system.
It can be expected that with the steady expansion of the scale of the artificial population and the continuous maturation of wild training technology, the vision of the green-tailed pheasant to "return from the cage to the forest" and realize the effective replenishment of the wild population is gradually becoming a reality.
