According to the current statistics, there are 13 orders, 37 families and 95 species of birds living inside the campus of East China Normal University. As an important part of the ecological environment, they get along with teachers and students day and night brightening up everyone on the campus like little magical fairies.

For campus bird culture week, Tang Sixian, director of the Ornithology Committee of Shanghai Wildlife Conservation Association and deputy director of the Life Science Experimental Teaching Center of ECNU, said that ECNU has a long history of bird culture development.

In the early 1990s, ECNU took the lead among other universities in Shanghai by offering bird watching courses, which changed the traditional way of observing such specimens and taught students to recognize birds through natural observation. According to a campus biodiversity survey, the number of birds on the campus of ECNU is significantly higher than that in surrounding communities, which must be related to the high rate of green coverage and ecological construction in our school, said Tang Sixian.

Some might ask, if there’s 13 orders, 37 families, 95 species of birds, then why can't we see them? In fact, we do see them ! Let Dr. He Xin, assistant researcher of Shanghai museum of natural history and alumnus of ECNU, take us on a trip to observe the birds on the campus. Alongside the campus roadside, on the lawn, or even inside the canteen hall, sparrows appear from time to time. After the rain is cleared, the water left over in the courtyard lawn attracts small sparrows to its pond as a bathing place. How lovely they are playing in the water together!