On Feb. 3, a video showed a girl rode an ostrich to class aroused heated discussions among netizens. Two days later, reporter interviewed the girl living in Dali City, Yunnan Province.

According to the girl, her ostrich is called "Brother Diao" (Diaoxiong in Chinese), a one year and seven months old family pet, it eats 6 catties of vegetable leaves every day. It is docile, and gets along well with the little master. Generally, the girl only rides near home, and sometimes rides to interest classes accompanied by her parents.

In the minds of outsiders, there have always been various rumors about animals in Yunnan. For example, "one of the transportations is elephant, and peacocks are everywhere?" "One of the tests is to ride an elephant?" "Peacock is a kind of pet and people always take it out for a walk." Actually, in the "Animal Kingdom" of Yunnan, there are some "surprises" indeed.

On June 5, 2019, a citizen said that three peacocks were "walking" near the Jiaosan Bridge in Kunming. In the video, the peacocks wandered around, with police escort behind them.

In July 2022, two security guards fed a little squirrel gently on the street of Kunming, attracted many citizens to watch, which was a very harmonious scene.

In October 2022, a cute red panda entered the student dormitory by walking along the outdoor flower bed in Yunnan University, then it continued to go, attracting many students to watch and take pictures...

It's harder to explain this time!

In fact, the "everywhere" animals confirm the love of Yunnan people for them, which shows Yunnan's rich biodiversity resources. As we all know, Yunnan is one of the 17 key biodiversity areas in China and one of the 34 most species-rich hot spots in the world. It is also an important treasure house of biodiversity and an ecological security barrier in Southwest China. There are more than 17,000 higher plants, accounting for 62.9% of the national total, and 1,737 vertebrate species, accounting for 58.2% of the national total in Yunnan!

Therefore, when "man and nature live in harmony" becomes a hot spot of attention, Yunnan, a place of extremely rich biodiversity resources, will inevitably be the centre of this topic.

In fact, whether it is riding an ostrich to school, taking peacocks out for a walk, or the "northern journey" of wild Asian elephants, or the great progress in biodiversity conservation in Yunnan, there is an increasingly clear fact behind it: the harmonious coexistence between man and nature is moving from a good vision to reality.

Gaoligong Mountain. Photo/Du Xiaohong

Of course, the "Yunnan IP" is not only Asian elephants and peacocks. There are also towering, snow-covered mountains all year round, the most famous karst landscape in the world, the largest deep-water freshwater lake in China. Yunnan is also the province with the largest number of ethnic minorities, multi-ethnic people live here for generations...

Sisters. Photo/Yin Bicong

Black-necked cranes overwinter in Nianhu Wetland. Photo/Cui Qingkun 

The prosperity of ecology leads to the prosperity of civilization. Standing at a new starting point, Yunnan will go all out to protect the lucid water and green mountains, and write a brilliant new chapter of "strive to become the vanguard of ecological civilization construction"!

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(Editors: Amy, Rachel)