There is a 15ft anthropomorphic panda in painted concrete by the media village here opposite the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing. There was a cuddly panda in the goody bag. On my desk here as I write, there is a drawing of a cute panda with a lot of children holding flowers. One world, one sickbag. But I'll tell you something to make you cast cynicism aside: there are still some real pandas left.

There are actually more than there were 20 years ago: an 1988 census counted 1,110 pandas left in the wild, but in 2004 there were 1,590. My God: are we going to be overrun by pandas? Of all the large animals out of kilter with the 21st century, the panda takes the prize. The only serious problem that pandas have with survival is (a) they don't like food and (b) they don't like sex. Well, that's a small exaggeration, but they are unbelievably finicky about both.

Their low-nutrition diet requires vast amounts of space for each individual, they are antisocial and territorial, and sex is not exactly an obsession. This was fine when we lived in a more generous and forgiving world: but humans have changed the evolutionary goalposts and it is not within the panda's scope to change with it.

What's more, pandas live in a land with a huge population and one that has gone through an industrial revolution. One that, between 1974 and 1989, destroyed half the remaining panda habitat.

But pandas have one seriously powerful card to play. The forces of evolution made them the most cuddly animal on the planet. And China, not always quick on the uptake when it comes to wildlife conservation, is committed to the survival of the panda.

There are now more than 50 panda reserves covering a total of 10,400 square kilometres, meaning that 61 per cent of the panda population is under at least nominal protection. The Chinese know that the world would never forgive them if they lost the panda.

But farewell to the baiji

But there are always casualities when development is too reckless. Britain lost wolves and beavers and bears: but China didn't learn from that. And so it seems likely that we must say goodbye to a creature that looks like a fish from Mars.

The baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, is almost certainly gone. One was spotted last year, but such sightings are so rare that the creature is said to be “functionally extinct”. Even if a few survive, there are not enough to form a coherent population with a future. Such creatures, and there are more than a few, are sometimes termed “the living dead”. An expedition along the great river in 2006 failed to find a single baiji. And they are or were amazing creatures: up to seven and a half feet and white, working in the murk of the river by sonar. I always thought this a gloomy, troll-like existence until I had an encounter with the not-dissimilar Ganges river dolphin. These mad monsters leaping from the water filled my heart. But the baiji was doomed. After all, 12 per cent of the world's human population lives in the Yangtze catchment. Pollution, noise pollution affecting the sonar, entanglement with fishing gear, collisions with propellers, habitat loss: these are just some of the factors that piled up against the baiji.

There were heroic efforts to save it late in the day, to create a reserve, to try captive breeding, but it didn't work. The big push came too late, with insufficient money and insufficient commitment from the top. There were other priorities, and the baiji and the world paid the price for them.

Birds come home to roost

But back to the bird list. I feared that I would be stuck on nine for the rest of the trip, but a morning mooch around the little local park revealed a merry party of a dozen azure-winged magpies. These pretty birds have the traditional magpie air of being up to no good. They love to lurk gang-handed around pines, and they really do have azure wings.

Then I took a trip out to the rowing lake to see the open water swimming, and this brought a few more birds, half a dozen of them great white egrets, paddling their way fastidiously through the river margins. And then, as we hurried over a bridge, a whiskered tern above the river. Admittedly I only saw it for a fraction of a second from a bus travelling in the outside lane at about 60 miles an hour, but my instant certainty - it's a bird I know pretty well - makes me reasonably confident. So damn it, I'm counting it.

And then an unexpected bonus: coming back late from the stadium, still bathed in the glow of a stupendous world record performance from Usain Bolt, I caught the eye of three mallards squatting together at the edge of the one of the little canals that criss-cross the Olympic complex. Like Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army, I asked them: do you think that's wise?

This is a good city. But it could do with a few more birds.

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