Life.Culture.Discovery.

A Hong Kong head of fauna conservation on ecology in the region

Gary Ades, the head of fauna conservation at Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, on the evolution of animal welfare and conservation in Hong Kong

Reading Time:5 minutes

Dr Gary Ades speaks on animal conservation and ecology in Hong Kong. Photo: Jocelyn Tam

Published: 7:15am, 10 Jul 2025

I WAS BORN in 1961. I’m the middle one. Our family base was in Salisbury (in southern England) during some of my primary years. I travelled around with my father, who was in the armed forces. His name was Jim Ades. So much of my childhood was spent seeing my father either coming back or going away to do something somewhere in the world. The only place we went that was a little bit dodgy was Bahrain. We went when I was about three. There were actual hostilities going on and, in the end, my mother, sister, brother and I had to be evacuated. So that was my early life and then, after that, short stays in the UK and then travels again to Hong Kong, Cyprus and Germany for a little bit. I followed my parents rather than going to boarding school. I was at St George’s School in Kowloon Tong from 1975 to 1977. My father ended up in Hong Kong in a retired officer’s role as the head of welfare in Shek Kong. And so he had the Gurkhas, RAF and army in that area. Throughout my childhood, my father was always saving birds. He had a special licence from the director of the then AFD – Agriculture and Fisheries Department. So outside his office in Shek Kong he had a few falconry stands with birds all sitting on them.

A young Gary Ades (centre front) with his mother and his siblings in Bahrain, in 1964. Photo: courtesy Gary Ades

WE LIVED in Kowloon and my brother and I used to spend a lot of time wandering the streets. At that time, there was blatant selling of all sorts of wild animals and we found warehouses with everything from bears to eagles. The sad thing was everything that you were looking at was going to be sold for food. In those days, in the markets, lots of quails were being sold. They were all treated like commodities, not like living animals. The stallholders would pick up a bunch of quails, wrap a string around their necks and then pull it tight so that you had these five quails all being strangled and then they hung them up until they died, and that was that. We saw grass owls and eagle-owls being sold on the side of the road for food. We would try to buy them to release them. In those days, I wasn’t thinking about ecology. We just wanted to save everything because it was so sad.

MY FATHER WAS focused on birds of prey, but I had bats, shrews and scorpions, anything. My mum was OK with it. She had a lizard that she called by name and it would run around the house. My first degree at the University of London was in zoology, the technical grounding for what I eventually did. Ecology is like the interaction of plants and animals and I realise that’s where I am. It’s not individual animals or individual trees and things. I’m interested in how they behave together, how they interact. And that’s the most important thing because that relates to biodiversity. Saving habitat, not just saving species.

Gary Ades’ father, Jim Ades (right), holding a grass owl, while talking to orchid expert Gloria Barretto (left) and Sir Horace Kadoorie (In wheelchair), outside his office in Shek Kong, Hong Kong, in 1993. Photo: courtesy Gary Ades

AFTER UNIVERSITY, I did a course in teaching English as a foreign language in Bournemouth, and had an Italian girlfriend, and lived in Italy for two years. Then, on a visit to my parents in Hong Kong, I met David Melville, the director of WWF-Hong Kong for many years. He needed someone to do a study on bats. There was a lot of development going on and it was not known if their localities were being destroyed. I was very happy when he said that but then it meant moving from Italy to Hong Kong in 1989. My girlfriend only stayed a year. My PhD was in the ecology of Hong Kong bats. During my study I found two or three new species that had never been recorded in Hong Kong. By the time I’d finished, there were 20 species and now there are 25. I was crawling around in old mines, places like Lin Ma Hang, near Sha Tau Kok, at the border.

Gary Ades with a little bittern he rescued in Cyprus, in 1979. Photo: courtesy Gary Ades

I’D HARDLY finished my write-up when I met Andrew McAulay, a nephew of Sir Michael Kadoorie. Kadoorie Farm at the time was a menagerie of animals, including a kangaroo and a few parrots. Wild-orchid expert Gloria Barretto was the botanic head at the time, but there was no real animal side. Andrew was interested in me leading part of Kadoorie Farm’s rebirth as a conservation and education centre. He became the new director. My remit at the beginning was everything to do with animals because there were lots of birds here and we wanted to start a rescue programme for birds of prey – some of these birds cannot be released back into the wild. So there’s an area just up the hill called the Jim Ades Raptor Sanctuary, with a focus on education.

Gary Ades holding a reptile at the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden Rescue Centre. Photo: courtesy Gary Ades

AROUND 1999, scientists across the world were starting to make noises about a crisis that was bigger than that of the dinosaurs, and it’s the loss of reptiles around the planet. We started to get Buddhist associations coming to us saying they’d just saved some massive Bornean or Malayan freshwater turtles they’d found in a market in Hong Kong. In those days these animals were not protected. It was like the traders were ahead of the scientists. They started to move these animals so fast that there were no laws in the export country and then the import country to protect these particular species. So there was one big effort we did in 2001, which was to receive over 7,000 turtles from all over Southeast Asia that had been on the way to food markets in southern China. There were 12 species among those turtles. We had lots of open pigsties that hadn’t been developed yet and we just used all of those, we used all of our indoor space. Many of the turtles needed heating because they were a tropical species and it was winter when this all happened. It ended up with renowned turtle experts flying in from America, from the UK, from Holland. They were all coming in to help us deal with what was a tipping point for massive education programmes and turtle protections. We deal with every snake case that the police (and the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department) are called for. The snakes come here and we make sure they haven’t been damaged while they were being captured. We have a 95 per cent release rate. We’re doing a scientific study with the government where we microchip all the pythons and we take measurements before we release them.

Ades conducts bat research in a cave in Hong Kong in 1991. Photo: courtesy Gary Ades

I DO HAVE A LIFE outside. I’ve got a Hong Kong wife called Vivian. We married in 2010. Her work life is very different from mine; she works for an insurance company. She’s really into animals now and we have a pet lizard at home. I’m a musician and I used to play in a band with David Dudgeon (emeritus professor of ecology and biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong). He was the bass guitarist and I was the guitarist. We had several bands but one of them was called Walk on Water. The drummer was (former RTHK DJ) Gerry Jose, whose daughter was a singer. It was rock music, so we played all sorts of things, from the Foo Fighters to David Bowie to the Police to Sting. I’m still playing, but I’m acoustic now, so I play in a small acoustic band, which I love because the days of being cool with my electric guitar are over.

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