The next morning, Geng returns with his son to collect his catch. At first sight, it looks disappointing: tiny fishes, lots of shrimps and some wriggling bugs. Geng doesn't seem too downhearted. The larger fish are kept alive, the only way they'll stay fresh in the heat. Surprisingly, some of the bugs are also singled out for special treatment. They are the young stage of dragonflies, predators that feed on worms and tadpoles. Nowhere else in the world are dragonfly nymphs harvested like this.

 

Back home, Geng spreads his catch on the roof to dry. This being  China, nothing edible would be wasted. There's a saying in the far south: we will eat anything with legs except a table, and anything with wings except a plane.

 

Within a few hours, the dried insects are ready to be bagged up and taken to market. It's the dragonfly nymphs that fetch the best price.

 

Fortunately, Caohai's dragonflies are abundant and fast breeding, so Geng and his fellow fishermen have so far had little impact on their numbers. But not all wildlife is so resilient.

 

This Buddhist temple near Shanghai has an extraordinary story attached to it. In May 2007, a Wild China camera team filmed this peculiar Swinhoe's turtle in the temple's fishpond. According to the monks, the turtle had been given to the temple during the Ming Dynasty, over 400 years ago. It was thought to be the oldest animal on earth.

 

Soft shell turtles are considered a gourmet delicacy by many Chinese, and when it was filmed, this was one of just three Swinhoe's turtles left alive in China, the rest of its kind having been rounded up and eaten. Sadly, just a few weeks after filming, this ancient creature died. The remaining individuals of its species are currently kept in seperate zoos. And Swinhoe's turtle is now reckoned extinct in the wild. In fact, most of the 25 types of freshwater turtles in China are now vanishingly rare.

 

The answer to extinction is protection and there is now a growing network of nature reserves throughout southern China. Of these, the Tianzi Mountain Reserve at Zhangjiajie is perhaps the most visited by Chinese nature lovers, who come to marvel at the gravity-defying landscape of soaring sandstone pinnacles.