In celebration of Earth Day, Masarang HK shared another successful Biodiversity Walk’n’Talk with the students, families and teachers of VSA Primary School. We explored the different habitats in Aberdeen Country Park and found some of the species that they support including mammals, reptiles, birds, plants, amphibians and bugs. As this year’s Earth Day theme was “Protect our Species” the day enabled us to think about the threats facing Hong Kong’s biodiversity and what we can do to help protect and conserve it.
We not only learnt about Hong Kong’s wonderful biodiversity, but were able to contribute our records toward the City Nature Challenge, a weekend competition where cities around the world compete to see who can make the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people. We feel very proud to have had the chance to contribute as Hong Kong came 2nd in recording the most number of species (3,596 species), which goes to show how amazing our biodiversity is!!
We are very grateful to celebrate Earth Day with VSA Primary and would like to thank the students for writing the wonderful blog below, describing their experience.
Blog contributed by Kanishk Gosalia (Y5A1), Matthew Wong (Y5A4) and Anderson Yeung (Y5A4)
On 28 April, we went on an intriguing trip to the Aberdeen Country Park organized by the Primary PTA. The Biodiversity Walk’n’Talk was led by Ms Sharne McMillan of Masarang Hong Kong who is an expert ecologist studying PhD at the University of Hong Kong.
The wonders of nature we saw were astonishing. We observed countless bizarre creatures, from the wild boar with a rather dirty coat of fur, and the coy of giant proportions, to the spider with a web of gold.
We saw traces of magnificent beasts prowling the lush terrains of Hong Kong as we tracked along the path of the country park, we uncovered species after species, marveling at their splendid features. We crossed terrain after terrain, from the bridge of the Aberdeen Lower Reservoir to the barren forest floor.
We learnt about the fragile balance of biodiversity and the human activities that are threatening this balance. We learnt about how our minuscule Hong Kong contributes more than 33% of our total bird species in China, and how our city houses more than 3300+ native vascular plants.
All in all, this experience has greatly enriched us with knowledge and wonders. We recommend you to join this most amazing of walks as it can make humans understand what the ecosystem is all about and how we can help it.
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