A devil possessed me. Only briefly, but it was enough to drive me from my seat at the main press centre at the Olympic Games here in Beijing, away from the windowless aircon-swept wasteland of desks and laptops and journos and up to the open-air café on the roof where, in between column-writing and blog-writing, I found myself drinking a cold Tsingtao.

And then, with the air of a desert traveller coming across an oasis, a cicada, flying with all the grace and precision of a Volkswagen, crash-landed on my shirt, for the shirt was green and I had been mistaken for a tree. You have to be grateful for what wildlife you can find at times likes this, in places like this.

Oh, there are plenty of green bits in the Olympic Park: but it's all too new to carry much life as yet. Still, the cicadas are about, everywhere they can find a foothold. They seem to time their bursts of sound with pulses of warmth, and when they sing their astonishing song the heat itself seems to be expressed in sonic form.

There are 2,500 species of cicada worldwide; you find them on every continent except Antarctica. There is even one in England; we call it the New Forest cicada, overlooking the fact that the same species is also found the other side of the Channel. Some of them are as long as six inches. I have always found the big ones distinctly alarming: they seem to lack all control when they take to the air, crashing into walls and people and your drink with unexpected violence.

They don't make their din by rubbing bits of themselves together, in the time-honoured manner of grasshoppers: they have curious organs - timbals - which they operate by muscular contraction, and it's more or less as loud as an insect can get. They have a powerful symbolic force here in China: they are great skin-shedders and they remind us that a person must go through many transformations in life if enlightenment is to be attained. And apparently they are very good in stir-fries.

Late love

China is a country going through profound changes: the young people see the world in a way incomprehensible to the old men who do the governing. One of the most extraordinary examples of this is the sudden rise of bird-watching societies all over the country. There is a Beijing Bird Watching Society: I wish I had the time (and the Mandarin) to attend their Wednesday lectures, or to offer my own poor help with their bird surveys.

Before the conservation comes the research, and the society is deeply involved in doing the work for three species: grey-sided thrush, the gloriously named relict gull, and mandarin duck. The last is not a dish on the menu, but a very pretty little duck that has gone feral in Britain: you can see them in Richmond Park.

One of the most astonishing places in China is Shenzhen, the “Overnight City”, a term that describes the time it took to build it. It is a place bordering Hong Kong, and where economic restrictions were lifted more than 20 years ago. It instantly became a demented boom town, full of semi-legal and downright illegal enterprises, a mad pursuit of money and inevitable reckless pollution. It is perhaps the last

place in the world where you would expect to find birders.

But the Shenzhen Bird Watching Society has been going for four years, it has 75 members, they are involved in environmental education, and they are particularly interested in surveying the black-faced spoonbill. All of which shows that, so often, a love of the wild comes from a sense of loss. If we could have brought ourselves to love wild creatures before, rather than after they needed human care and protection, the world would be a somewhat different place.

Two for joy

But you will be agog to hear of my own bird-watching experiences. I am proud to announce that the list so far stands at a big five. Four of them are birds you would expect to pick up in London: feral pigeon, house sparrow, magpie, swallow. I have also encountered the red-rumped swallow, bigger and glidier than the one we are used to. The magpies are all over the place: they are regarded as good luck, and so they escape persecution and stir-fries.

That's the trouble with putting a city together in too much of a hurry: you lose the softness. The more you emphasise the works of humanity, the less human a place becomes. All over the world, it is true that the human dimensions of a place come from the colour green. This is a pattern followed across the developing world: a place develops at breakneck speed, and becomes a wonderful celebration of human hope and ambition - and then a few year later, everybody wishes they had gone at it a bit more slowly and thoughtfully. Beijing is an incomprehensibly ancient city: and yet it has only just been built. That's why it hasn't got enough birds.

Simon Barnes's Beijing blog is at timesonline.co.uk/olympics

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