A passion for nature helps a former teacher find his true calling

Newsmaker

In Taizhou, he continued bird watching in his spare time and gradually, turned a few of his colleagues into birdwatchers, established a police birding team and became a local newsmaker.

After receiving too many calls reporting poaching cases from the local people, and handling the cases one after another and saving quite a few injured birds, he gradually realized one person's limitation in conservation, and law enforcement was "far from being a ultimate force to make a change".

"As an idealist and a former teacher, I think education is the ultimate way," he says.

After successfully applying for a grant from the Ford Foundation, a globally-oriented private foundation based in the United States, he quit his job and went to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Wisconsin in the US for another master's degree. This time, he majored in environmental education.

"It really suits my ideals of helping to raise environmental awareness in the country," he says.

After graduation in 2008, he returned to Shanghai, the hometown of his wife, and worked with the World Wide Fund for Nature as a project manager.

Kunming

But Shanghai was too big and too metropolitan for him. Although he got another job offer from Rare, another international conservation NGO, he decided to move his family and career to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. His wife, a city person, had been reluctant to move to "such remote countryside", but agreed to the move eventually.

During his stay in Kunming, he had a short bird watching trip to Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in 2009. Then in 2010, he was told that XTBG's science education department was looking to hire an environmental education officer.

In September 2010, he started working with the garden and helped to initiate, design and promote the garden's environmental education programs. "I finally felt I had found the perfect platform to realize my ideal," he says.

In January 2011, he helped launch the first bird watching festival in the garden. It attracted dozens of bird watching societies and hundreds of birdwatchers from all over the country. A bird photo exhibition was also opened to the public at the festival.

The festival was so successful that it has since become a regular annual event and helped turn XTBG into one of the country's leading birding destinations.

"Thousands of birders come every year, especially in the winter," Wang says. "Their records have helped add two new birds to the list of birds in China. But I am afraid of phone calls from birders who expect my introduction or to guide them. Sometimes they were just too many of them."