Saving the spoon-billed sandpiper – a three-pronged attack

I thought  that it was time for one of my occasional forays into our international work.  This report comes from my colleague, Ian Fisher...

Earlier this month, 14 spoon-billed sandpipers hatched in captivity at Slimbridge Wetland Centre as part of an ambitious and exciting partnership between the RSPB, WWT, Birds Russia, Moscow Zoo, BTO, BirdLife International, ArcCona Consulting and the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force.  The tiny spoonie breeds in the sub-Arctic tundra in the far east of Russia, and the remaining wild population is frighteningly small –  fewer than 100 pairs.  So eggs travelled by car, helicopter and plane from Anadyr, via Moscow and London, to Slimbridge, where a custom-built facility houses a growing reserve of birds as insurance against extinction in the wild.  Once old enough to breed at two years, the plan is that the offspring of these global voyagers will return to Russia to bolster the wild population.

 

Training by torchlight

Building up a stock of captive birds is only one part of the story.  Far from the breeding grounds in Chukotka, spoonies spend the majority of the rest of the year feeding on the extensive mudflats in coastal Myanmar and Bangladesh.  Here bird trapping is the prime suspect for causing steep declines in the population.  Local and international conservationists have had some success in finding and funding alternative livelihoods, and RSPB staff have been involved in several expeditions to survey the intertidal areas of the Gulf of Mottama in Myanmar.  The local BirdLife Partner BANCA has been instrumental in progress so far, but there is still much to do to re-educate and provide sustainable activities for the people who live on the shoreline.

But what of the 8,000 km journey from Russia to south-east Asia?  The critically important stop-over sites along the coastlines of China and both Koreas suffer from wide-ranging conservation problems, including extensive development, drainage, damming, and pollution.  Overall, East Asian intertidal habitats (including beaches, marshes, mudflats, mangroves and sea-grass beds) are disappearing at a rate unprecedented for the coastal zone elsewhere in the world.  Some countries have lost more than half of their coastal wetland area to land reclamation since 1980. These rates of habitat destruction are comparable to those of tropical rainforests and mangroves.

Teng Mung Community Project

So our third line of attack is through influence of international policy for protection of the East Asian/Australasian flyway - at the recent Ramsar Conference of Contracting Parties in Bucharest, for example, we were working to ensure that important wetlands are given statutory protection across flyways, so that migrating birds, including the spoon-billed sandpiper, don't get half-way along their journey and find there is nowhere to take a break and refuel.  RSPB hosted a 'side-event' entitled "The disappearing tidal mudflats of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway" to highlight the issues.

Our work on the spoonie is a great example of organisations, experts and individuals from around the world working together to save an animal from extinction. A bird like the spoon-billed sandpiper, with its odd little beak, doesn’t deserve to be wiped out through human activities. All elements of this project – from our work with subsistence hunters in Myanmar and Bangladesh, to efforts to protect the flyway, to the captive breeding programme here in the UK – are necessary parts of the jigsaw.  Without dealing with all pieces at the same time, this ambitious project would struggle to succeed. "

Hiding Spoonies

And collaboration extends further - to major funders such as SOS - Save Our Species, and to thousands of generous individuals who care about the fate of this quirky little bird and want it to survive to inspire future generations."

These really are fabulous birds and I plan to provide you with further updates soon.  If you want to find out more, you can visit the Saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper website and read personal accounts from the field at the RSPB's Saving Species blog.