Red mouth and legs, beautiful posture, sometimes it perched on the stone, sometimes it flied up in the air. On July 3rd, more than 20 black storks appeared near the Sanmenxia Dam, integrating with the rushing Yellow River, which formed a unique ecological picture.

Black stork is commonly known as black stork, steel stork, old crane, which is the stork family and belongs to the bird. Its head, neck and spine are all black brown, so the name was called black stork, because its number is extremely rare, it’s known as “the giant panda in the bird”, which belongs to the first-class national protection of animals.

 The photographer Zhang Mingyun said that on July 1st, his friends and him in the Wangguan Yellow River Wetland to have bird watching, they found this kind of black stork in the waters near the Sanmenxia Dam. The black storks, egrets, herons and other birds got together in the Yellow River to forage, so they were luckily surprised to take pictures of these birds and found that there were 18 black storks. "I have been watching birds here these days and found that the number of black storks is not only 18, there should be more than 20." Perhaps because of the release of water from the dam, hundreds of other birds such as egrets and herons also gathered here to forage." Zhang Mingyun said that this is the largest black stork population found in Sanmenxia in recent years. Although the black stork is a migratory bird, it is seen in Sanmenxia in this season, which indicates that Sanmenxia is not a stop for them and the high probability is that these birds will stay here and prosper. Previously, black storks had been seen in the Yellow River shoals of Houdi Village in Dawang Town of the Demonstration Zone of Urban and Rural Integration and in Ganshan National Forest Park.

It is learned that black storks are particularly "picky" birds on foraging waters, they like remote and undisturbed open forests, river valleys and swamps. The emergence of the black stork population is proof that the ecological environment protection of Sanmenxia is getting better and better.