“In the Northern Darkness there is a fish, its name is Kun. The Kun is so vast, no one knows how many thousands of miles it spans…” On December 11, 2025, when these famous lines by Zhuangzi met the “Bird Wave” spectacle at the Yellow River estuary in Dongying China, an amusing and magical reaction was created – tens of thousands of migratory birds danced in the air, forming black ‘waves’ that sometimes stretched like fins and other times curled up like a fish’s body, humorously dubbed by onlookers as the “real-life flying Kun fish shoal”. Related videos quickly went viral on social media platforms.
Indeed, the Kun is too big to be contained in just one pot. According to relevant monitoring data, this year’s peak number of Ruddy Shelducks reached over 240,000, a 40% increase from last year. These migratory birds formed a gigantic Kun-shaped pattern in the sky, with netizens marveling that the Kun described by Zhuangzi turned out to be real, making the topic #The Kun In Northern DarknessIs Real# trend on Weibo.
It is reported that this spectacle occurred in the Yellow River Delta Wetland in Dongying, Shandong Province. From afar, these flocks of migratory birds resembled a giant Kun swimming, and during dives, their wings looked like clouds hanging from the sky, closely matching the imagery of “Kunpeng” as described by Zhuangzi.
Some people commented, “the words from our textbooks suddenly came to life,” while bird-watching enthusiasts shared, “seeing tens of thousands of birds fly together is unforgettable.” Some marveled at how ancient myths have prototypes, while others joked that this is a real-life version of “Free and Easy Wandering”.
This article is from a submission, please keep the link for forwarding: https://www.36ti.com/topb/1013