| The Chinese Crested Tern, Thalasseus bernsteini, a seabird of eastern Asia, has far been considered a Critically Endangered (CR) species since the very beginning of quantity assessment on the endangerment of birds. Although, in the last decade years or so, only two colonies of the bird had far been reported, that is, the colony in the Taiwan Straits and the colony around the Greater Zhoushan Archipelago, respectively, the authors pointed out, in 2010, that the Northern colony of the bird might currently still “be appearing in the rim of the Yellow Sea”. Then, in 2011, new findings of the bird got revealed in Rizhao of Shandong. Quite recenly, on 7 August 2016, Chinese birders (Zhang Lin and others) found an adult bird with a bird of the year inhabiting on the coast at Rudong of Jiangsu, E China. Next day, August 8, the Korean governmental authorities officially declared that two breeding pairs of the Chinese Crested Tern observed started nesting on an island offshore the SW Korean coast in April and the whole process being well recorded. Then, from August 19 to September 5, people of Qingdao Birdwatching Society (Yu Tao, Wang Hai-bin, and others) constantly saw the bird in Jiaozhou Gulf of E Shandong, and, to be the extreme, two adults with two birds of the year on August 19﹣20 and a small flock of six adult birds on August 30 observed. It hence might be doubtlessness of current existence of the CCT′s northern colony, while, these updated new findings have also brought with them further evidence onto the jigsaw puzzle of the breeding distribution of the bird, making it now appearing relatively more completed and integrated than ever before. At last, we still would like offerring the same question, like once we did in 2010, that is, what a portion of the CCT′s world population that we can say under monitoring, or, simply to say, in our hand or our sight… 80%, 50%, 30%, or even less? |
