China’s Fishing Friends Work Hand-in-Beak

His boat festooned with feathered friends, Zhang Laosi drifts lazily down a river on the outskirts of Beijing, bringing a bit a rural fisherman’s life to the city.

The sight of Zhang and his fishing birds, cormorants, is rare in busy Beijing, but it is common in rural China.

Zhang and thousands of other rural fishermen still use cormorants to do their fishing. The birds dive gracefully into the water, snatch up fish and return them to the boats.

The fishermen keep the birds from eating the fish by placing a band around their necks to restrict swallowing. When the bird returns to the boat, the fisherman pulls the fish from its beak and the bird obediently goes off for another dive.

But Zhang and some of his fellow fishermen had come to Beijing to let the cormorants eat the fish they catch and people gathered on the river bank to watch.

“A river close to our home is dry this summer, so we came up here to feed the birds,” Zhang, 59, said. He was among villagers from Guan, a village in neighboring Hebei province, who hired a truck to carry their boats and birds to this stream.

“They are losing their feathers now, so we just let them eat.” Zhang said. “In spring and autumn we fish commercially.”

When the fishing is good, he said, a man and four birds can earn $540 a year, double a factory worker’s wage.

With wings clipped and trained from birth, the birds are docile, friendly and return when called.

“Their names are Black Fish, Painted Face and Little Dog,” Zhang said, pointing out three of his birds.

While Zhang is here letting his birds feed, relatives back home are working a farm, which produces most of the family income.

Fishing is a sideline activity, one of many encouraged by the government to raise rural income under current economic reforms.

“Things are 100 times better than before,” Zhang said. “At home I have a color television, a tape recorder and a refrigerator.”