A heartfelt life education class (Beautiful China: Green Stories Around Us)

“Uh-oh…” A series of piercing, high-pitched bird calls cut through the treetops, and the numbers on the decibel meter screen rapidly jumped past “70.”

“Brown cuckoo! It’s it again!” the students shouted.

On the afternoon of March 31, experts from the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment visited the Shenzhen Bao’an Middle School campus, leading the students in conducting real-time noise measurements and natural science outreach.

“The ‘Brown cuckoo’ you’re talking about—its scientific name is the cuckoo. March and April are the breeding and courtship season for cuckoos. Male cuckoos use their calls to attract female birds, and generally don’t call from a fixed location…” Listening to the expert’s explanation, the students’ initial annoyance caused by the bird calls gradually turned into curiosity about nature and a desire to explore.

A Reply Letter Refusing to “Dismantle the Bird’s Nest”

A few days earlier, it was the calls of the cuckoo that sparked a life-education discussion at Bao’an Middle School that drew widespread attention. The trigger was a handwritten anonymous letter delivered to the office desk of the Secretary of the Party Committee and President of Bao’an Middle School (Group), Yuan Weixing.

“Recently, the brown cuckoo on the treetops outside the window has been brimming with vitality and calling with great passion… Please send someone to remove the bird’s nest!” In the letter, the student stated plainly that the cuckoo’s continued calling was especially clear in the quiet environment for exam preparation, making it difficult for everyone’s thinking to stay focused. Therefore, they earnestly requested that the school dismantle the nest—“so these free creatures can fly toward green hills and clear waters.”

The principal’s office on the third floor was almost always unlocked and connected to the teaching building of the senior high division through a corridor. Students who normally walked in through the door included those stopping by during breaks to share their concerns and those coming to offer suggestions. When the principal wasn’t there, leaving a letter on the desk was also one of the common ways for students to communicate with Yuan Weixing.

“When I saw this letter, what I first felt was the students’ rationality and sincerity. There was no complaining—only the telling of their worries. The demand for a quiet learning environment is also understandable.” After receiving the letter, Yuan Weixing did not simply refuse, nor did he respond perfunctorily. He immediately wrote a serious public reply letter, which he shared in the video account he used to communicate with teachers, students, and parents.

In the reply, Yuan Weixing first empathized with the students’ hardship, and then explained patiently: “When birds call at dusk, it is instinct—it is courtship, it is a declaration of territory, it is a way of responding to their companions. They won’t change their rhythm just because humans have the college entrance exam.” He suggested that students could try treating bird calls as nature’s “white noise,” and regard the bird calls at evening as the “dusk concerts” birds present.

In the letter, Yuan Weixing wrote: “This world was never made to exist for just one person. Learning to coexist with all things is a required course for growth”“The ultimate goal of education is not to make the world adapt to us, but to help us learn how to live with the world.”

This reply letter, brimming with warmth, quickly “went viral.” Netizens praised it: “This is what education should look like.” The student who wrote the letter, Le Zongyan, also proactively responded: “The principal’s reply is a great life-education lesson. Learning to live in harmony with others and with nature and all living things is a lesson we must learn.”

An Educational Opportunity Brought by an Accidental Incident

When an accidental incident becomes an educational opportunity, this life-education lesson did not stop there.

“It’s not appropriate to drive the cuckoo away, but we also can’t ignore it.” Yuan Weixing said. The school invited experts in the ecology field to come into campus to carry out science outreach activities, and at the same time organized student representatives to hold a democratic recommendation meeting to jointly discuss ways to deal with the cuckoo’s calls.

Yuan Weixing introduced that when cuckoos call nearby, the volume can reach 60–80 decibels, so it does fall within the category of noise. However, their activity range is not fixed, and the period of impact is limited. In the girls’ dormitory buildings near the树林 (woods), the school provided earplugs for everyone free of charge, and also used artificial bird nests to guide birds to the campus leisure area—the “Life Garden”—keeping them away from the dormitory buildings and the teaching zones.

In addition, Bao’an Middle School planned and organized project-based collaborative learning activities involving multiple teaching and research groups, including political thought and ethics, biology, geography, Chinese language, and fine arts, among others—making students the main characters in exploration: the political group studied laws and regulations on animal protection; the biology group studied the living habits of campus birds; the geography group investigated the ecological characteristics of the campus; the Chinese language group wrote short natural science popularization pieces; and the fine arts group drew a bird species atlas for the campus—improving students’ ability to discover problems, think through problems, and solve problems in real-life scenarios.

Behind the “viral” reply letter from the principal lies the school’s intensive cultivation of life education over more than 20 years. Yuan Weixing said the school has already built a school-based curriculum system of “3 dimensions (natural, social, spiritual life), 6 modules, and 144 themes,” and the related teaching achievements have won the First Prize in the Fourth National Teaching Achievement Awards.

With Yuan Weixing’s推动, life education courses have been integrated into everyday life in small ways—ducklings in the pond nibbling lotus blossoms; the school then mobilized students to form a “Campus Duck Management Committee,” with teachers and students working together to find solutions to the ecological conflict; when a typhoon hit, the principal wrote a letter to guide students to show awe for nature and see perseverance; there is also a dedicated “Campus Cat Club”—students group up to take care of stray cats…

“Scores are important, but they’re not everything; exams are important, but they’re not the endpoint.” In a discussion with student representatives, Yuan Weixing said, “Leaving the campus, you may encounter more ‘disruptions.’ Learning to adapt, learning to be understanding, and learning to live with the world—that is the lifelong wealth.”

A City’s Practice of Ecological Protection

This life-education class is also a vivid example of Shenzhen building a national ecological civilization demonstration city.

In recent years, Shenzhen has repeatedly “gone viral” for bird protection:

For the 100,000-plus migratory birds that overwinter here each year from November to the following March, Shenzhen Bay Park refuses to add high-brightness streetlights, returning the night to nature;

The Futian Mangrove Ecological Park designed “bird-nest streetlights,” creating safe “housing” for cavity-nesting birds;

Some ultra-tall buildings apply dot stickers to their glass curtain walls to prevent bird collisions;

…………

Biodiversity surveys and monitoring organized by the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment show that Shenzhen has more than 450 species of wild birds, accounting for about one-third of the total number of bird species in China. Among them, more than 100 species breed in Shenzhen. According to monitoring by the Guangdong Nei Lingding Futian National Nature Reserve, from 2021 to 2025, the number of migratory birds recorded each month across the Shenzhen side remained basically around 40,000.

Further Reading

Cuckoos are typical brood-parasitic birds. They do not build their own nests; instead, they lay eggs in the nests of other birds such as myna birds and laughing thrushes. Therefore, even if someone wanted to remove a nest, it would be difficult to find the cuckoo’s own nest. When cuckoos are heard calling, it means the campus ecological environment at Bao’an Middle School is good and biodiversity is rich.

A cuckoo’s courtship calls are like humans snoring—low-frequency noise with strong penetration and a long transmission distance—but they appear only during the courtship season from March to April, and naturally stop after May.

How to treat these “small disruptions” that come from nature tests a city’s civic character. Civilization has never been about humans “taming” nature. Instead, in development, it balances ecological protection, and finds equilibrium between human life and the survival of wildlife. When we are willing to leave a corner of space for bird calls and try to resolve ecological conflicts with scientific methods, our respect for and tolerance of nature becomes a warm footnote to ecological civilization. This life-education class at Bao’an Middle School helps the seeds of ecological civilization take root and sprout in students’ hearts, making the beautiful vision of humans and nature living in harmony become a moving landscape on campus.

In Guangdong, complaints about cuckoo calls are very common. Starting in 2023, we deployed about 100 acoustic signature monitoring devices in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. Among them, 30 devices were deployed in Shenzhen. Using an AI identification algorithm for bird vocalizations, we monitor the calls of 500 bird species, hoping to use scientific data to map the patterns of bird distribution. At present, we are drawing a bird-call map while also carrying out ecological science popularization for the public, guiding people to understand the ecological value behind bird calls, and working to bring more rationality and tolerance to urban governance.

(The author is Liu Yang, a professor at the School of Ecology, Sun Yat-sen University, and Deputy Secretary-General of the Bird Species Branch of the Chinese Zoological Society; the interview and compilation were done by Cheng Yuanzhou, a reporter for People’s Daily.)