Water birds winter on Dongting Lake in Yueyang, Hunan province. PHOTO BY YANG YIJIU/FOR CHINA DAILY

　　For the past four decades, Yang Yijiu, a 76-year-old photographer in Yueyang, Hunan province, has focused his lens on Dongting Lake, artistically documenting its shores, animals, people, and the return of an ecosystem once on the brink of collapse.

　　"As a little boy, I grew attached to the lake," Yang said.

　　"I loved to walk along it and observe everything."

　　While working for the local government in the 1980s, Yang came across a scholar"s essay in a journal about the lake"s ecological decline. The writer warned that Dongting Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in China, was being choked by silt and land reclamation and could vanish within 50 years. "I couldn"t believe it," Yang said. "That was the moment I decided to record the lake"s changes through my lens."

　　Yang Yijiu walks along the shore of Dongting Lake. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

　　In the 1980s and 1990s, Yang spent considerable time focusing on the people who lived along the lake — fishermen who spent their lives on boats and migrant workers who cut reeds and harvested lotus roots. His photos documented the fishing methods that defined that era: the "maze nets" that trapped fish of all sizes and the electric fishing that devastated fish stocks.

　　In one photograph from the 1990s, a row of cormorants is perched on the bows of fishing boats, their dark silhouettes mirrored in the rippling water below. The birds, with their hooked beaks and long necks, were trained to dive for fish and return to their master"s boats with their catches.