'Everyone has this seed of nature inside of his heart or soul or wherever you call it,' Wong Yan says.
'When they get the chance to know it more, it's important for them to have someone to tell them about this.'
We need to keep the habitat to keep the birds safety. It's the right time to do the right thing.
And word is spreading. 'We are getting more and more nature lovers in the recent five years,' Yan says.
Another young birder, Ying Chi Chan, puts the surge in birding interest down to two factors.
'In general, the Chinese people are getting richer and can afford binoculars and cameras,' says Chan, also a shorebird ecology PhD student at the University of Gronningen.
'Also—it's more common for people to go online, and you have all these forums for birders to exchange information. That helps a lot to drive people to improve themselves.'
Terry Townshend, a British expatriate living in Beijing, says there has been a growth of birding content on Weibo and microblogs.
Chinese birders are even using the Wechat messaging platform to rapidly disseminate environmental information.
Townshend sees environmental awareness growing in China through his hobby and also his work as an environmental lawyer.
But he is quick to put the growth of birdwatching in perspective.
'In the UK we have a birdwatching society, and in a country of 60-65 million people there're more than 1.2 million members of this organisation,' he says.
'The equivalent number of birders in Beijing, a city of 20 million, you'd expect maybe 400,000 members. The reality is that there is about 400 members of the Beijing Birdwatching Society.
'But that shows the potential for expansion.'
'Historically, the Chinese really cared about nature,' says Dr Yan Xie, a zoologist with the China Academy of Sciences and founder of the Protected Area Friendly System.
'After so many years of need for development, people had a period of a long time not caring.
'But now, they are getting to know nature is more important now.'
She says this is due, in part, to higher standards of living and education, as well as pollution scares in food supplies.
But there is another sort of change afoot, contained in the concept of 'eco-civilisation'.
Since the late 1970s, China's ruling party has established aims for various 'civilisations' which can be understood as broad aims for humanity. These are interpreted and implemented through national policies.
Eco-civilisation has emerged as a goal at the highest level, expressed in an official document titled 'Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Further Promoting the Development of Ecological Civilisation'.
'You know we have the "agriculture civilisation" and the "industry civilisation" and now we come into the "ecological civilisation",' says Xie, referring to the concepts which guided policy through the eras.
'This is a new face of human development.
'When you get into ecological civilisation, [it] means during your [land] development you need to be thinking about environment protection and nature conservation so that the humans are living in harmony with nature.'
Part of the implementation of eco-civilisation will stricter environmental accountability implemented through the local levels of government.
'Any local environmental damages recorded will be the responsibility of the top leaders in the region or province, or their ministries,' says Professor Lei Guanchun, dean of the School of Nature Conservation at Beijing Forestry University.
He says environmental goals will be included in the equivalent of local government performance appraisals, which were previously dominated by GDP figures as indicators of success.
But understanding what is happening in the environment for a country as large as China has its challenges, and the professor hopes that more people will become more engaged with their local environment.
'Public participation in environmental damage monitoring and assessment—that's the thing [that would] ensure that the decision makers don't make any mistakes.
'If everyone can stand up and [ask], "if you make this decision, how much will it damage the environment?" it will have a dramatic [effect],' he says.
Things are changing in China, says Qingquan Bai, who has just walked several kilometres of mudflat with common greenshank scat in his hand.
'Food consumed by greenshanks will include a shell like this,' he says, explaining that the small swirl of middle shell is all that is left after the gizzard crushes the food.
Spending his Saturday morning collecting migratory bird poo is an indication of the passion of this man, who breaks mid-sentence to point strongly to the distance.
A huge flock of birds has lifted off the Yalu Jiang flats near the North Korean border, perhaps 200 of them, in two huge chevrons. They are starting to migrate.
'Eurasian curlew's migration!' Bai says.
'I think they're heading to the north-west, to their breeding grounds.
'At Yalu Jiang, there are many thousands and thousands of birds. I've seen 60,000 bar-tailed godwits with green knots [together]—big flocks flying above my head.
'But what touched me most is [seeing] migration. One time, four years ago, a flock of bar-tailed godwits heading to the north-east; they were bauera sub-species from New Zealand, they were heading to Alaska, they called loudly in the sky.
'That really touched me, that moment. Life is a journey, it's the right time to do the right thing for every life—human beings, for all of us.
'Every country, every NGO, we need to protect their habitat. It's very important. We need to keep the habitat to keep the birds safety. It's the right time to do the right thing.'
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