[InKunming--Yunnan] Recently, the Southwest Forestry University and Yuxi Normal University jointly did the research which was about avifauna resources of three lakes around Yuxi city, and they found 13 large birds with bright colors among the reeds in the southwest corner of Qilu lake national wetland park in Tonghai county. The bird, named Purple Swamphen, is known as the most beautiful aquatic bird in the world, and it is also a new record of bird species in Yuxi.

The professor Luo Xu who comes from the Southwest Forestry University introduced that the Purple Swamphen is an aquatic bird of rallidae. It is distributed widely in the world, however, rare in China. It was once thought to be an extinct species of bird so that was not classified as Class I state-protected wild animal. The Purple Swamphen can be regarded as one of the iconic species reflecting that the regional wetland ecosystem is relatively perfect. There are only small quantity in Yunnan Province, Guangxi Province, Guangdong Province, and Fujian Province.

These years, Yunxi city keeps enlarging the ecological protection, and promoting the management of the three lakes. In the latest birds’ investigation around the three lakes, there have been a record of 90 species within 35 families of wild birds, and 7 species of wild bird protected by the state. The 13 Purple Swamphen spotted in this research reflect the improvement of the ecosystem of the lake, as well the protective effect preliminarily revealed.

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(Editors: Christine, Rachel)