The wetland full of migratory birds, guarded by village rules for three generations

Every year after the first frost, the wetland east of the village starts to get busy.

First a few scouts — grey cranes coming down to test the place. Then the main force, in numbers: swans flying in a V, geese blotting out the sky, ducks of every kind I can't name packed shoulder to shoulder on the water. The villagers don't say the birds are here. They say the old guests are back.

The wetland is a little over two thousand mu. For generations it has been our East Lake. In my grandfather's time, when the harvest was bad, people went down and picked eggs, set nets for geese, and in winter they burned off the reeds along the shore. The rules came in the nineteen-eighties. A few of the elders, watching the birds thin out year after year, sat in the ancestral hall and agreed on a covenant: no catching birds in East Lake; no picking eggs in East Lake; no burning the grass in winter; no building a house within three li of the shore.

Four rules, written into the village covenant, red paper and black ink, posted for forty years. My grandfather was one of the men who signed it.

Making rules is easy. Keeping them is not. In the nineties a businessman from outside came and offered to contract the mudflats by the lake for development, on terms generous enough to build the finest house in the village. The village committee sat until midnight, and the old men of my grandfather's generation said one thing: "Sell the land and it's gone. The birds leave and they don't come back. This lake belongs to the village, and it belongs to the ones that fly here from Siberia." The deal died. The man left saying, enjoy your poverty, guarding birds. Those years the village really was poor. The young people all went away.

The turn came twenty years ago. More people started coming to watch birds — photographers, researchers, one group after another — and the villagers guided them, fed them, put them up, and slowly there was income. Later the county folded wetland protection into its compensation scheme, and bird warden became a proper village post. The first households to live off ecology were exactly the ones who had kept the rules hardest. My father took over from my grandfather and spent more than twenty years as warden, walking the lake twice a day in winter, wearing out more pairs of rubber boots than anyone could count.

One sheet of village rules held three generations' hands in check, and kept the migration route of tens of thousands of birds. That invisible line on the map is older than any statute.

As a child I thought the rules were absurd. What's the harm in one egg? One winter my cousin came from the city and shot a wild duck with a slingshot, and my grandfather chased him half the way through the village. My cousin hid indoors and wouldn't come out. My grandfather stood at the door and said something I still remember: "They fly thousands of kilometers to rest here. If you shoot one, next year it won't come. And if it doesn't come, your children will never see it."

Nobody used the word ecology then. My grandfather's reasoning was that plain, and that hard.

East Lake today is a provincial wetland park. The monitoring station says a hundred-odd species and tens of thousands of waterbirds winter or stop here every year, some of them first-class national protected species. Half the village earns from the birds now: homestays, guiding, farmhouse kitchens. The grandest building in the village isn't anybody's house. It's the bird rescue station. Injured birds come in, recovered birds go out, and on release day all the children come to watch.

Last year the village revised the covenant. The four old rules stayed exactly as they were, and one was added: the lights by East Lake must be dim at night — migrating birds are afraid of light. A middle-school student proposed it, after learning about light pollution in science class. On voting day it passed unanimously.

If my grandfather were still here, he would be pleased. The rules he made, someone kept making.