A couple of days ago (Feb 13th) I wrote on this blog that I’d just posted the news that the sea-wall set to block off the Saemangeum tidal-flats was due to be finished in April this year - and not in 2007 as we’d previously thought. It meant that we (as Birds Korea) had twelve months less than we’d thought to continue the campaign to save Saemangeum. I also wrote that I couldn’t put into words how bad that decision felt to me.

About the same time a very good friend of mine, M, mailed me to say that despite his best efforts no-one had sponsored him on his “Birdwatch for Saemangeum” - a fund-raising idea that my brother Nial and I had come up with in an attempt to support a group of researchers coming to South Korea to survey the huge numbers of shorebirds that use the Saemangeum region as a staging area every year. M ended his mail with the phrase that despite all the traffic to his site, no-one seemed interested in protecting “miles of muck”.

I know that M meant well when he said that. It reflected his frustration, it was an alliteration his poetic side couldn’t resist, and he certainly couldn’t guess at the effect his words would have - but they cut me to the core. It’s taken me a while to realise why, but now I have it: for all the work I’ve done over the years, for all the efforts that Nial and I have poured into the campaign to save Saemangeum, M was right - the world still sees Saemangeum as “miles of muck”.

I feel incredibly protective about these “miles of muck”, about the thousands and thousands of birds that travel up and down the globe to feed there, even about the fish, the crabs, the clams that live there. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s probably because my passion for birding was re-kindled at Saemangeum. I was confronted with the fact that I knew sod all about conservation and politics as I struggled to understand how such a hugely important place could be “reclaimed”. I learnt just how little I knew about wetlands and wetland birds while thinking about those “miles of muck”. In truth my life was changed there. I made a decision some four years ago that I was going to work to save the Spoon-billed Sandpipers, the Dunlins, the Bar-tailed Godwits and Great Knots, the thirty or so other species that stage there…And I feel I’ve let them down badly. I feel like I’ve failed to be honest.

In a few short months a 33km sea-wall is set to block Samenageum from the sea, two huge sluice gates will drain the tidal-flats dry so that they can be “developed”. If the wall closes, then for the first time since the melting of the last Ice Age flooded the Yellow Sea huge flocks of migratory birds will spiral down towards Saemangeum’s “miles of muck” and not be able to find the tidal-edge. This spring birds like Bar-tailed Godwits will arrive after a non-stop flight all the way from New Zealand. They will have built up fat reserves to make that long flight - and they will be expecting (as generations of godwits before) to feed on the tidal-flats and rich mud at Saemangeum. They may not find them. They won’t know it, they won’t understand it, but - if the wall closes - they will be losing their most important feeding grounds. All that they need will be in the process of being taken from them.

If the wall does close, then as the years go on fewer and fewer birds will arrive in the Yellow Sea. Not because they’ve gone somewhere else - we’ve already stolen most of the feeding areas on both the Korean and the Chinese shores - but because there are simply fewer and fewer of them. Migration is an immense consumer of a birds energy. The energy that is used needs to be replaced, or birds simply won’t be “fit” enough to continue. Open to disease, cold-snaps, changes in the weather, susceptible to pressures from disturbance and hunting, many die already. Take away this prime re-fuelling stop and there’s little doubt that fewer will be capable of surviving to continue the journey north to their breeding-grounds, fewer will breed when they get there, and fewer will survive the journey back south again.

We live in a period of time when we are overwhelmed with stories like the loss of Saemangeum: the threat to humans of Poultry/Bird Flu is at most nominal, but is hyped out of all proportion by a largely ignorant media; James Lovelock (the founder of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis) says that the earth is fighting back to redress the natural balance we humans have upset, but can it fight back fast enough to prevent global warming?; we are emptying the oceans of fish, hacking down the Brazilian rainforests to grow soya to feed cattle, and are on the verge of finally losing the Tiger for ever…does it matter if we lose a few “miles of muck”?

Well, it matters to me that we lose them. It matters to me that because of a stupid decision made years ago, and because the forces of development are so much more powerful than a few people sat banging away on lap-tops, whole populations and whole species are being condemned to uncertain futures. It’s being done so that a few people can justify spending vast amounts of money building a wall that hardly anyone wants and no-one actually NEEDS. Being done because not enough of us wanted them to stop, and those of us who did weren’t persuasive enough or loud enough, or - something, I guess if I knew the answer we’d have been more effective years ago…

Officially the fight to save Saemangeum is still very much on. The decision to re-start the construction is going back to a Court of Appeal next month - maybe the judge will support the appeal, maybe he won’t. To be honest, it’s not all that likely. Is there still an appetite to fight for the survival of something that so clearly looks doomed? I suspect that the developers are hoping that the courts, people in general in fact, are bored of the Saemangeum problem; that the government will probably hope that they can close the door on this awkward and uncomfortable series of appeals and leave the development of Saemangeum behind them; that everyone else will turn their attention to the next environmental catastrophe currently being dreamt up by someone in an office somewhere - and the “miles of muck” will be swept into the past. I tell you now, they may hope that the world will forget - but that’s not going to happen.

A researcher in Australia recently wrote to Nail and I congratulating us on the efforts we’d made. He suggested that we’d made it a lot harder for the Korean government to contemplate another reclamation. It would be great if he’s right, but I’m finding it hard to think about that. At this very moment I feel like I’m in mourning for a part of my life that suddenly feels over, for thousands of migratory shorebirds that I couldn’t help, for “miles of muck” that’s about to disappear, and I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and I’m low.

That’ll pass though, and I’ll come fighting back. We - Birds Korea - will push on with the “Shorebird Monitoring Programme” we proposed and which has now been officially taken up by the Australasian Waders Study Group, and we’ll collect the data that proves how catastrophic the Saemangeum Reclamation Project really is. We’ll document the decline that we are certain will take place in shorebird populations along the East Asian/Australasian Flyway. We’ll put the figures down for everyone to see. And when we do, I - as in Charlie Moores and not Birds Korea - am going to make myself feel better by personally finding a way of metaphorically shoving them straight up the developer’s metaphoric arse…