Introduction

Wild animals are everywhere in Hong Kong. They make a living in lush forests, forage along highways and dive under rattling barges. They slither along drainage channels, hop through muddy puddles, and flap across the moonlit sky. Eagles sometimes land in the city.

This is not what I thought I would find when I first came to live here twelve years ago. I thought I would just see steel and glass towers, shopping malls, grey flyovers crawling with red cabs, low-flying jumbo-jets and grim high-rise estates.

For at least 170 years this has been a place where humans came to escape, survive and strive. Some have hit gold, others have struck comfortable, and many struggle. Few of the seven million inhabitants stop to look at the wildlife that engulfs them, at least if they do, they don’t talk about it much, or read about it.

     

There is a lot of wildlife here, both in the sense of sheer volume and diversity. More than four hundred bird species can be found here, and a quarter of all the snake types in China are represented. Indigenous bats, newts and frogs have been discovered, and some of the most endangered animals of the planet quietly exist here.
      There are things that conspire to make this place a surprising wildlife haven. Above all, it is hot and humid at least eight months of the year, ideal for plant growth. Lots of plants means lots of habitats and food for animals.

Most of the green cover you can now see in Hong Kong came about after the Second World War, a fact that is difficult to absorb when you drink-in the dense woodland that covers large swathes of the territory. When the Brits took it over, the hills were bare from centuries of deforestation by small village communities who harvested trees for fuel.

      The ecological damage would have been worse if it hadn’t been for the tradition of keeping “Feng-shui woods”, clumps of indigenous forest, preserved behind villages. These harboured small pockets of wildlife that saved species from disappearing altogether. The preservation of the woods is usually explained in terms of superstition, villagers kept them for good luck. I find it more convincing to think that the woods made villages nicer, better places to live and raise children.

    

In the early years of the colony dutiful civil servants planted trees, mostly to a create buffer against erosion and pollution around newly built reservoirs. Sunshine and humidity conspired to feed a powerful regeneration of woodland, only for it to be lost once again, in war and the Japanese occupation. Chronic fuel shortages returned, and forests were plundered back to their roots.
  But the woods rebounded for a second time in a century, and so did the animals, helped along by regulations on land-use, laws against hunting, and by the fact that for decades most Hong Kongers were too busy to venture into the forest to see what might be lurking.

    

It helps that per capita wealth in Hong Kong is much higher than what it is nearby in places that have a similar climate and natural environment. This includes the neighbouring mainland province of Guangdong, as well as the countries of Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines where people are poorer and there is more incentive to trap wildlife, log forests and plant cash crops.  Here the animals are more or less left alone, probably unaware of the good fortune to be existing in a place where humans don't have time for them.
    Then there are the steep hills that even billionaire property developers avoid because they won’t profit from them quickly enough. Kowloon is Cantonese for “Nine dragons” and it refers to the sharp peaks that line the horizon if you stand at the central ferry piers and look across the harbour on one of the few clear days of the year. Those nine dragons, with their counterparts on all the islands, do a great job of protecting the environment.

These things added together have created a kind of accidental ark, an unintended haven.

    

Five different types of eagles inhabit this place, including permanent residents such as the beautiful white-bellied sea eagles, and magnificent imperial eagles that swoop in from Central Asian plains every year in pursuit of 60,000 water fowl that flock to the marshes. There are strangely evolved fish called mudskippers that live most of their lives outside of water, and massive pythons in the undergrowth waiting to pounce on passing cats and dogs. We have mysterious scaled mammals called pangolins that have been nearly exterminated in other parts of Asia by animal traffickers, and we have the best studied population of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins anywhere in the world.
     This is a trove of wealth that is relatively easy for any Hong Konger to experience. Our country parks must be among the easiest anywhere in the world for city dwellers to reach. We can go and find these animals, watch them, even touch some of them, and learn about the world they and we live in. We can learn universals such as the sub-molecular forces of attraction that keep geckos stuck to walls, and the light warping optical technology built into cuttlefish skin. And we can get local knowledge such as the role of fruit eating civets in the regeneration of woods, bat patrols that keep the mosquito population from exploding, and the part played by politics and history in creating a no-man's land ideal for migratory birds.

    In finding out more about the wildlife of Hong Kong I also learned that every animal is a living exhibit of evolution, the epic drama of life on Earth. You can see it in the relic leg-spurs of Burmese pythons, and the intricate co-evolution between sonar-scanning bats and sonar-evading moths. You can find it in fiddler crabs on muddy shorelines with eyes that have been pushed up on stalks to see above water in the shallow tidal zone. Our biggest mammals have shed their legs to return to a permanent life in water, and macaques are uncannily familiar because they are so human with their little hands and their penetrating eyes. Even in a city regarded by many as cleanly detached from nature, the greatest lessons of biology are evident right in front of us.

    

Darwin would not have been surprised. He did a lot of groundwork on evolution looking at plants in his garden, and racing pigeons in suburban lofts. His voyages to far off islands provided the contrasts to prove his theories. It wasn’t the exotic location that mattered, it was the laboratory conditions made possible by isolation. If he had been born in the Galapagos he could have gone to the English countryside to check some of his ideas, or even Hong Kong.
     This is surprising in a place where nature seems like a distant and messy irrelevance. But look between the banking headquarters and the property giants, and you’ll find second World War tunnels where bats have moved in, in the sky you'll see large birds of prey soaring on thermals between tower blocks. Spiders, lizards and snakes crawl through bushes just off the paved path, and at night wild boars gain the courage to enter suburbia. The city hasn't been removed from nature at all, it is right inside of it and riddled with it.

    

There is also so much we give away about ourselves when we look at the animals we live with. Military institutions pay big money to study the gecko’s wall sticking powers. Stock markets have hummed with excitement over goats spliced with spider genes, animal traffickers are pushing pangolins to the brink of extinction because of misplaced "traditional" beliefs in the magic of their odd scales.
    Our macaque population shows how mixed up we are.      

    People love monkeys with their almost human ways so they feed them. This made life easier for them and boosted their population, but it also stripped the primates of their wild independence, made them more reliant on us, and turned them into a nuisance. The experts spoke out against feeding, the government imposed a ban. But still the feeding went on, the population continued to expand. We had to do something, so we put them on a contraceptive programme. Meanwhile native pythons that would happily help to keep the monkey population down are shipped out to mainland China, because someone in a private housing estate was scared, and they called the management.

     After all management is what we do. It isn’t our fault that we can calculate population growth, and invent contraceptives, that’s the way the human mind has evolved. But I like that fact that we never know when a feisty pit-viper might make a jab for our feet, or a 150 kilogram boar is going to ram itself into traffic.

      In the early 1990s the people who managed Hong Kong on behalf of Britain had many meetings with the people who were going to manage the same on behalf of China. They sealed the deal with a massive airport project on reclaimed land, only to discover that very wild, very pink, very lovable dolphins lived right in the middle of the massive construction project. It was a tricky situation but nothing was going to derail that airport, so the animals were promoted in cartoon form and became a mascot of Hong Kong’s historic handover. At the same time conservationists said it was a relic population with no future, they would soon be gone.

     Twenty years later they are still here, they found a way to live alongside the airport. They pop out of the water and put on modest displays for a handful of eco-tourists every day, many of whom never imagined they would be watching dolphins on a visit to Hong Kong, let alone pink ones. The dolphins have always got the rest of the Pearl River Delta to explore if they want, but for now at least they keep reminding Hong Kongers of their existence, as if to pose the question, what do we want from this place?