1903 A Naturalist's Ramble in South China 151 

 A Naturalist's Ramble in South China. 



By J. C. Kershaw, F.E.S. 



Day is just breaking, and already the bulbuls are chattering 

 and squabbling in the bushes and bamboos, whilst the air, 

 after the stifling hot night, feels quite chilly, and the country 

 seen in the hazy uncertain light looks picturesque and invit- 

 ing enough. But the July sun quickly changes all this, and 

 under his fierce rays the long sweeps of burnt-up frowsy 

 grass and the naked, arid hills give little promise of much 

 animal life. But we find later that this is not altogether 

 the case. 



Most of Kwangtung and some of Kwangsi provinces are 

 granite country, mostly disintegrated near the surface, but 

 with boulders of solid rock, which have withstood the 

 weather, scattered over the hills and plains, some of the 

 hills being a mass of piled-up rock, lumps of white quartz 

 gleaming here and there on the bare red earth. In places 

 the hills are seamed and cut into by deep and narrow 

 ravines, often 30 feet or more deep and only 3 or 4 feet 

 wide, the sides sometimes clothed with a kind of bracken 

 and polypody and other ferns and shrubs. 



Some ranges are sparsely wooded with dwarf firs, but the 

 greater part are utterly barren, except sometimes for coarse 

 grass and fern. Truly, the Chinese have ruined and dis- 

 afforested their country, cutting and lopping the trees for 

 firewood. Indeed, little vegetation escapes the native, and 

 as we walk on we meet several small parties of women and 

 children armed with roughly-made knives or choppers, and 

 bamboo rakes, with which they rake up leaves and grass 

 and hack and chop the bushes and undergrowth, till the 

 only wonder is that any plant survives at all. 



Over these hills, which range from a few hundred to over 

 2000 feet in height, sail numbers of the black kite (Milvus 

 mclanoides), well known to Britishers in China under the 

 name of "Bromley" kites. 



The first part of our ramble lies along what is called a 



