Young Beijingers like Li are increasingly becoming interested in conservation, and many now think birdwatching – also known as birding – is a cool thing to do.

The Beijing municipality is spread across 16,800 square kilometres (6,500 square miles) and the birdwatching site where Li and her friends are on the lookout for new species is on the border with Hebei province, a two-hour drive from the city centre.

A group called Birding Beijing recently calculated that the city has the second-highest number of bird species, at 510, of any capital city in the G20, after Brazil’s capital Brasilia. The city also has more dragonfly species than the whole of Britain, according to field guides.

Leopards are even expected to soon reclaim their old habitat in the forest of Mount Ling, and other mammals are also making a comeback.

For Terry Townshend, 50, a conservation economist, Beijing’s biodiversity is not only an asset that could be monetised but it has the potential to become the symbol and future identity of the city.

A resident of the capital since 2010, Townshend knows a lot of the highly specialised written Chinese characters for bird species. Originally from England, he works for the Paulson Institute, a think tank that fosters US-China relations, and is a director of an environmental education company. He also advises the Beijing municipal government on biodiversity.

Townshend recently came across Li and her two friends birdwatching at Mount Ling. The hobby, he says, is becoming increasingly popular among Beijingers and he was not surprised to meet the three modern young women birding at 9am on a weekday, in temperatures of minus 11 degrees Celsius (12 degrees Fahrenheit).

Townshend spotted 38 species of birds that day. Some were very large, including a vulture with a 3m (10ft) wingspan surfing thermal currents, and a flock of black storks flying over a frozen river.

Much of Beijing’s biodiversity is due to bird migration, Townshend explains. To the north of Beijing, in Mongolia and Siberia, the skies in summer are thick with insects, which are an inexhaustible supply of food for the birds and their young. To the south lie the tropics of Southeast Asia, an ideal place to spend winter when temperatures in Siberia plummet to Arctic levels. Beijing is in between, a pit stop on what is known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway – the great bird migration route that connects the two climatic extremes.

“When I came here, the scale of the migration, the volume of birds coming through, shocked me,” Townshend says. “Any green space, the smallest of parks, was full of birds taking a rest on their journey. Another advantage of Beijing is the variety of habitats – mountains, grasslands, reservoirs, wetlands, parks, forests. There is something for almost every type of bird.”

According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, more than a million birds were spotted in Beijing’s 88 observation stations in the first two months of 2020, which is a peak season for northbound species to stop over. That was 300,000 more than numbers for the same period the previous year.

The Chinese capital and its environs also accommodate the world’s heaviest flying bird: the great bustard, which typically grows to more than three feet tall. They stop in the local grasslands on their migration south from Mongolia, but in some years a few of the birds will spend the whole winter in Beijing.

“They are huge birds,” Townshend says. “Like giant Antonov transport planes, they need a lot of open space to take off.”

Birdwatchers can even spot interesting species in the very heart of Beijing’s urban sprawl, he adds.

“Several years ago, a former UK ambassador – he was into birds – asked me to survey the birds in the garden of the embassy,” Townshend says. “On the very first day I saw a species that had never before been seen in Beijing. The ambassador joked, ‘Do you realise you cannot count it on your Beijing species list, because the embassy is British territory?’ I replied that I could – I saw it flying out of the garden into Chinese airspace.”

What is particularly interesting about birdwatching in China is the demographics, Townshend adds.

“In the UK when I was growing up, it was 99 per cent men. Here it is 50-50 men and women. Also, it is very much a family activity. With the growing environmental awakening in China over the past 10 years, more and more people are hungry for knowledge about the environment and nature. A lot of parents feel they never had it as kids and want children to have that connection with nature.”

Birdwatching in China is seen as a modern and fun hobby, he says. “It shows you are into the natural world, which in itself is trendy and novel. It has never been the case in the UK. There, you are often seen as a ‘trainspotter’, an ‘anorak’.”

Townshend travelled to Mount Ling not only to spot birds but also to retrieve an infrared camera trap he had set up in the forest. Flicking through the photos later he sees a fox, a badger and several roe deer.

This deer species and wild boar are now plentiful in the mountains once again, the result of greatly improved protection of both the animals and their habitat, he says. Local biologists expect the critically endangered north Chinese leopard, which preys on boar and deer, to reappear in Beijing soon.

“Leopards were here until the 1970s, and the return of leopards to Beijing is inevitable,” he says. “It is possible they are already roaming on occasion into Beijing from their stronghold in the Taihang Mountains in Shanxi province.”

The leopards’ smaller cousins, Amur leopard cats, are already common in the Beijing municipality. “Not many capitals can claim to have wild cats,” Townshend says.

Larger mammal species found in Beijing include the Asian badger, hog badger, racoon dog, hare, weasels, polecats, palm civets and the goatlike goral, he says. Wolves used to be here too, he adds, but they disappeared in the 1970s.

In the summer of 2020, unable to venture out to look for birds because of Covid-19 restrictions, Townshend decided to find out which animals lived on “a little patch of land where nature is allowed to take its course” close to his home on the outskirts of the city. He found an astonishing biodiversity of insects. “I was pretty shocked to discover that Beijing has 60 species of dragonflies. The whole of the UK has 57.”

He has put proposals to the Beijing authorities to harness this biodiversity. One suggestion involves Miyun Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to Beijing. “Without a doubt, it has the potential to be a world-class nature reserve,” he says. “It can attract thousands of cranes in winter if the habitat is managed right.”

Such a reserve could generate income from tourism for the local community and also provide employment, he adds.

Townshend is thinking far into the future. “Beijing’s fantastic biodiversity and ease of access to nature can become a future symbol of Beijing and it’s selling point – providing a quality of life that attracts global talent to live in the city,” he says.

But with the city’s population now exceeding 20 million, he warns: “Nature cannot be taken for granted. It requires awareness and nurturing to maintain it.”