The Yellow River Delta is the fan of silt that the Yellow River has built into the Bohai Sea at Dongying, in Shandong province in north-eastern China, since the river moved to this course in 1855. It covers about 8,000 km² and is very young land: a flat spread of reed marsh, red Suaeda saltmarsh, tidal mudflat and shallow sea, with the river mouth in its present position since 1976. Its core is the Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve, created in 1992, which covers 153,000 hectares and 131 km of coast. Parts of it were listed as Ramsar Site no. 2187 in 2013. The reserve has recorded 373 bird species. It is the world’s most important breeding ground for the Oriental stork and a stopover for shorebirds on the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, whose numbers can reach a million. This guide is organised by the animals and plants that live there.
Oriental Storks on the Islands and Pylons of Dongying
The delta’s best-known species is the Oriental stork, a large black-and-white wading bird listed as Endangered by the IUCN. Its decline came from habitat loss, hunting and pesticide use in rice farming. The delta is the world’s most important breeding ground for the species. Since 2003, about 2,200 Oriental storks have hatched in the reserve, a large share of a world population of only about 3,000 birds. In 2022 alone, 470 chicks hatched. Many of the chicks hatch on islands created in the middle of waterways. Others are raised in nests built on top of utility poles.
Dongying has been named China’s “Hometown of the Oriental White Stork”. The stork comes first here because its recovery shows the reserve’s work most clearly. When the reserve took its present form in 1992, the wetlands had been drying out since the mid-1980s as farms upstream took more of the river. Restoration by the reserve administration began in 2002, and the reserve’s count of stork hatchlings runs from 2003.
Ten Crane Species in the Winter Reeds
The reserve supports ten species of crane. About 200 red-crowned cranes spend the winter there, along with about 1,000 common cranes. The delta also marks the southern limit of the red-crowned crane’s breeding range. The Siberian crane winters here too. Its eastern population spends the winter mainly in the Poyang Lake basin on the Yangtze, and the Yellow River Delta holds the second-largest wintering population of the species. Hooded cranes, a first-grade protected species, and white-naped cranes also occur.
The cranes depend on the reed marshes. According to the reserve’s habitat survey, reed marsh covers 32,772 hectares of its coastal wetland. Conservation work has helped the reed beds expand in recent years, along with Suaeda salsa and tamarisk. The delta’s climate is warm-temperate and monsoonal, with an average annual temperature of 11.9 °C, about 210 frost-free days a year and no snow.
Whooper Swans and Thirty Kinds of Duck
Waterfowl are another winter feature. The reserve records 30 species of ducks, geese and swans. Among them is a wintering population of about 2,000 whooper swans, which arrive in November and stay until April. During migration, numbers of several waterfowl species pass 10,000. Inland wetlands, including man-made ones, rivers and other permanent water, cover 7,966 hectares of the reserve. Its smaller northern section protects wetland at the mouth of the Diaokou River, an old course of the Yellow River that was cut off from the main river in 1976. Since June 2010, managers have released river water into it to keep its marshes from drying out. A system of channels and sluices supplies the reserve’s 49 management areas, so water reaching each one can be controlled.
Saunders’s Gull and the Red Suaeda Flats
Some of the reserve’s most important species rely on one kind of saltmarsh. Suaeda salsa is a low saltmarsh herb that absorbs salt through its roots. Its stems and leaves turn from green to deep red in autumn, carpeting the intertidal flats in what the delta’s visitors call the “red carpet”. The Suaeda flats lie in the tidal and estuarine zone and are full of crabs, which many birds eat.
Saunders’s gull is the specialist of this habitat. It is a small black-headed gull, only about 33 cm long, that lives on estuaries and intertidal marsh and is threatened when that marsh is turned into farmland, fish ponds or oilfields. The Yellow River Delta is its second-largest breeding ground. Another of its few remaining strongholds is the Yancheng coast in Jiangsu, which holds about a fifth of the world population. As of 2023, Dongying was supporting 17 protection and restoration projects in the delta, including replanting Suaeda salsa and removing Sporobolus alterniflorus, an invasive smooth cordgrass that grows out over intertidal mud.
A Million Shorebirds on 38,534 Hectares of Mudflat
The largest habitat in the reserve is bare mud. Intertidal mudflats cover 38,534 hectares, more than any other habitat in the reserve. The tidal range along the reserve’s coast is only 0.46 to 1.78 m, but on a coast this flat even a small fall of the tide exposes a wide area of mud. The delta lies on both the East Asian–Australasian Flyway and the West Pacific Flyway. In spring and autumn the reserve hosts 48 shorebird species, whose combined numbers can reach a million birds as they stop to feed on migration.
Several of the passing waders are among the world’s rarest. Nordmann’s greenshank, the little curlew and the white-naped crane are all listed in CITES Appendix I. They share the flats with eagles: golden and white-tailed eagles, together with the great bustard and the scaly-sided merganser, are among the reserve’s first-grade state-protected birds. Along the same flyway, a chain of Yellow Sea and Bohai coast wetlands now forms a UNESCO serial World Heritage Site for migratory birds, with 12 components inscribed in two phases, in 2019 and 2024.
Land Made Since 1855: The Habitat Under the Birds
None of these habitats is old. From 1128 to 1855 the Yellow River flowed south of the Shandong Peninsula into the Yellow Sea. Floods between 1851 and 1855 sent it back north to the Bohai Sea, and the delta has been growing ever since. The river once carried about 1.05 billion tonnes of silt to the sea each year, the heaviest sediment load of any river in the world. That added about 3,240 hectares of land a year and pushed the coast out by up to 2.2 km a year. The mouth has shifted about 50 times since 1855 and has stayed in its present position since 1976.
That growth depends on water, and the river has at times run dry. As irrigation increased upstream, the Yellow River often failed to reach the sea from 1972 onwards. In the 1990s it ran dry before its mouth for an average of about 180 days a year, and in 1997 it failed to reach the sea for 226 days in a row. With less silt arriving, parts of the delta coast have been eroding since 1996. The river’s flow also changes through the year. It is lowest from March to June, floods from July to October and is held back by sea ice from December to March. A Yellow River Protection Law, in force since 2023, now regulates water use along the whole river.
From 187 Species to 373: Counting Birds in the Reserve
Bird counts show how the reserve has changed. Only 187 bird species were recorded there in 1993. The current total is 373, of which 91 carry first- or second-grade state protection. Across all groups, surveys have identified 1,632 animal species and about 685 plant species. The plants include Tamarix chinensis and the wild soybean, Glycine soja. All of this lies beside one of China’s most important oil fields. Settlement of the new land began in 1898, the Shengli Oil Field brought large-scale industry, and Dongying became a city on 1 October 1983. The reserve’s boundaries were drawn in 1992 to avoid the oil installations as far as possible. It is divided into a 79,200-hectare core area, a 10,600-hectare buffer zone and a 63,200-hectare experimental zone, and land reclamation and pollution, especially from oil extraction, remain major threats.
A Planned 3,518 km² National Park on Land and Water
There are plans to expand the reserve into a 3,518 km² national park, which would be China’s first national park covering both land and water. The delta already draws tourists. The Yellow River Estuary Eco-tourism Area is rated a national 5A tourist attraction, the top grade in China, and wooden walkways have been built across the wetlands so that people can reach the autumn red carpet and the reed beds. Because so many of the birds cross borders, many of the species and their habitats are also covered by China’s bilateral migratory bird agreements with Australia and Japan. For the river that supplies all this silt, from the Bayan Har Mountains across the Loess Plateau, read our complete guide to the Yellow River. Our article on why the Yellow River is called China’s Sorrow covers the floods that moved its mouth, and our overview of China’s geography places the Bohai coast within the wider country.