Species Note
Terry Townshend on Jankowski's Bunting
One of East Asia's rarest birds, and a BirdLife Species Champion's effort to keep it from extinction. Recorded in Beijing.
Terry Townshend is a British birder and conservationist based in Beijing, best known for the Birding Beijing blog. This conversation was about his work as a BirdLife Species Champion for Jankowski’s Bunting Emberiza jankowskii, also known as the Rufous-backed Bunting.
The species is classed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. What makes it a striking case is the speed of the change: within living memory it was described as locally common across a range taking in the Russian Far East, north-eastern China and the Korean peninsula. It is now confined to a small number of sites in China, and the population has contracted to a fraction of what it was.
The bunting is a grassland species, and the decline follows the pattern grassland birds show almost everywhere, conversion of steppe and grassland to cultivation, and the loss of the particular sward structure the species needs rather than the loss of open country in general. The same mechanism, on a different continent and at a different altitude, has put Sharpe’s Longclaw in difficulty on the Kinangop grasslands in Kenya.
Current status is tracked by BirdLife International and by ornithologists working in north-eastern China.