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The Xinjiang Ground Jay in the Lopnur Desert (Photo by Ming Ma)
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The Xinjiang Ground Jay (Podoces biddulphi) is a bird species endemic to China. It has a re-stricted range, living only in the Taklimakan Desert, southern part of Xinjiang. So far, little information has been known of the status and ecology of the bird in the world. Since 1988, I have been taking field investi-gations on the distribution, populatio...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... the four species of ground jays (Podoces) in the world, two are found in the west of China ( Qian et al., 1965;Cheng, 1987): the Xinjiang Ground Jay (P. biddulphi) ( Fig. 1) and the Mongolian Ground Jay (P. hendersoni). Xinjiang Ground Jays occur only in the Taklimakan Desert, the southern part of Xinjiang. Since the species was established by A. Hume in 1874, little has been known of its status and ecology. The current essay describes such information based on a long-term field ...
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Citations
... panderi), and Iranian ground-jay (P. pleskei); however, little is known about them (Ma, 2011;Zheng, 2017). ...
... They found that the probability of nest success from the start of incubation to fledging was only 0.186, and illegal cutting of shrubs was the main threat to this endangered species. As the only species of Podoces living in the desert, the geographical distribution, survival rates, nest-site selection, and impact of roads on the behaviour of Xinjiang ground-jay have all been examined to some extent (Ma, 1998;Ma, 2001;Ma and Kwok, 2004;Yin et al., 2005;Ma, 2011;Xu et al., 2013;Tong et al., 2018), but research on breeding remains limited. The only study related to the breeding biology of Xinjiang ground-jay reported the size of the nests, egg size, clutch size, and the main food provided to the nestlings by the parents. ...
... Xinjiang ground-jays are monogamous birds, and both parents feed the young (Ma, 2011). Females perform almost all incubations (Ma, 2004). ...
... The Xinjiang Ground-jay is an endemic bird species mainly distributed in the desert and semi-desert areas of the Taklamakan Desert. These birds build open bowl nests in Tamarisk shrubs between February and June, laying 1-3 eggs per clutch [29]. Limited research has focused on the breeding of Xinjiang Ground-jays and even less on their nestsite selection. ...
... The vegetation is mainly composed of Tamarisk (Tamarix spp.), Euphrates poplar (Populus euphratica), Alhagi (Alhagi sparsifolia), common reed (Phragmites australis), and Russian boxthorn (Lycium ruthenicum) [28]. Birds of prey, such as the Long-legged buzzard (Buteo rufinus), are the main predators of Xinjiang Ground-jays in the study area, followed by reptiles, such as the Forsyth's toadhead agama (Phrynocephalus forsythii), and insects [29,30]. ...
Nesting-site selection is an important aspect of the breeding process in birds, as it usually determines nesting and breeding successes. Many factors can affect bird nest-site selection, including anthropogenic disturbance. In an extreme desert environment, such as the Taklamakan Desert in China, birds’ survival pressure is high, especially for rare species such as the Xinjiang Ground-jay (Podoces biddulphi). We studied nest-site selection in this species from March 2017 to May 2019. A Chi-square test, independent sample t-test, Mann–Whitney U-test, and generalized linear models were applied to possible nest-site selection factors for Xinjiang Ground-jays. The main determining factors were the distances to human settlements, water, and the edge of the oasis. Xinjiang Ground-jays nested near available water resources for easier access, which is important in arid environments. Individuals chose to nest far from the oasis edges and settlements to increase food availability and reduce interference from human activities, respectively. Overall, water, food availability, and anthropogenic influence were the main factors affecting the nest-site selection of Xinjiang Ground-jays in this study. Therefore, these results suggest that there is a trade-off between survival and reproduction. Further studies are required to verify whether similar site preferences may also apply to other desert-dwelling species.
... The Xinjiang Ground-jay (Podoces biddulphi) has its distribution surrounded by, but not mixed with, the distribution of the Mongolian Ground-jay, of which it is the closest relative. It is endemic to the Taklimakan Desert and able to live even in the harsh interior of this sandy desert, providing that groundwater is accessible to vegetation in low areas between the dunes (Ma and Kwok 2004;Ma 2011). The artificial irrigated vegetal belt that protects the Taklimakan Desert Highway from encroaching sand has been found to positively affect the occurrence of Xinjiang Ground-jays along the road, a phenomenon ascribed to these plants providing cover, drinking water, food, and nesting sites (Londei 2011;Xu et al. 2013). ...
The study of seed dispersal, biotic seed dispersal, and even less, the role of birds in it, have been almost neglected in deserts. Virtually absent from the literature on seed dispersal are the ground-jays, genus Podoces, four species of the crow family that inhabit arid environments, even true deserts, from Iran to Mongolia. Although they are omnivorous, they seem to mainly depend on the seeds of desert plants during the cold season. There are suggestions in sparse literature that they may contribute to seed dispersal similarly to several corvid species of other climates, by caching seeds in useful microsites to save them for later consumption and thus actually favoring the germination of the seeds they fail to recover. Future research might benefit from comparison with the vast literature on their better-known seed-caching relatives. This paper is aimed at providing basic information on each ground-jay species and some sug-gestions for investigating their likely symbiosis with desert plants, with possible applications to the maintenance and restoration of vegetation in a very extended arid zone.
... Данные наших наблюдений монгольской саксаульной сойки и сведения из литературы по кашгарской (Ma, 2011), иранской (Radnezhad et al., 2011(Radnezhad et al., ) и среднеазиатской (Ковшарь, 2016 саксаульным сойкам, подтверждают необходимость разделения рода Podoces. У центральноазиатских саксаульных соек -Eupodoces, оба вида строят чашеобразные гнезда без крыши, в отличие от среднеазиатских саксаульных соек -Podoces, у которых крыша присутствует в подавляющем большинстве гнезд. ...
... Since Hume (1874) and Przheval'skii (Prejevalsky, 1879) independently described this species, the Xinjiang Ground Jay (Podoces biddulphi) has always been considered endemic in the basin of the Tarim River and its terminal, now dried-up, lake, Lop-nor. Przheval'skii named the species Podoces tarimensis on this belief, which is still supported by recent maps of recording locations (Ma, 2004;Ma and Kwok, 2004;Ma, 2011). These maps actually add the lower courses of independent tributaries of Lop-nor to the species' range, which is nevertheless still all within the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. ...
... However, Ma (2011) points up a recent range expansion to the adjacent Qinghai and Gansu provinces, based on records in Collar et al. (2001) and Sun and Li (2009) respectively. The former finding is an unpublished single sighting M. Turton and G. Speight obtained near Golmud in Qaidam Basin in 1986 and still awaits confirmation. ...
... Therefore, Sun and Li's (2009) is an important finding, but more probably as a confirmation of the persisting presence of the Xinjiang Ground-jay in Gansu than a sign of recent range expansion to this province. Although this species rather than the other ground-jays may suggest the true desert bird because of more frequent occurrence on sand dunes, its nesting habits involve stands of desert poplars (Populus euphratica = P. diversifolia) and tamarisks (Tamarix spp.) (e.g., Ma, 2011). These plants are phreatophytes and thus, especially the poplars, are affected in their growth by the distance to groundwater (Gries et al., 2003). ...
