The Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper Eurynorhynchus pygmeus is one of East Asia’s most enigmatic and threatened shorebirds. Breeding only on the Chutotsk Peninsula of eastern Russia southwards to the isthmus of the Kamchatka peninsula, staging on the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea, and wintering in south-east Asia the species was probably never abundant because of its highly-specialised habitat requirements but over the last twenty years the global population has - to use a well-worn phrase - dropped off a cliff. There are now thought to be less than 300 pairs left, and - to quote BirdLife International - “action is now urgently required to prevent the extinction of this species”.

Yubu Island, South Korea. October 15 2008
Photo © Espen Lie Dahl. Used with permission.

The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is a unique and rapidly disappearing shorebird. If it becomes extinct - which is a distinct possibility now - it will be entirely due to human activity: reclamation of key staging sites, disturbance on and of the breeding grounds, and hunting.

Of these it’s perhaps the recent loss of staging sites which have so badly impacted the Spoon-billed Sandpiper the most (eg the calamitous reclamation of Saemangeum in South Korea, a critically-important 40,000 ha area of tidal-flat and estuary which was closed to the sea in April 2006), and these reclamations are already affecting many other shorebird species too. A 2009 report co-ordinated by Danny Rogers of the Australian Waders Study Group shows a startling decline of many other tidal-flat shorebirds which also use the East Asian/Australasian Flyway, and which were counted wintering on Western Australia’s Eighty Mile Beach (an area that - unlike much of the Yellow Sea especially - has remained essentially unchanged).

How startling? The figures below are derived from shorebird counts made in Dec 2008 on Eighty Mile Beach compared with the mean counts made over the three winters of 1999 - 2001.

• Bar-tailed Godwit Limosa lapponica: DOWN 53%
• Curlew Sandpiper Calidris ferruginea: DOWN 59%
• Far-eastern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis: DOWN 40%
• Great Knot Calidris tenuirostris: DOWN 24%
• Red Knot Calidris canutus: DOWN 22%
• Greater Sandplover Charadrius leschenaultii: DOWN 64% (not known to pass through Korea so staging sites are perhaps in Vietnam where habitat loss has also been huge)
• Grey Plover Pluvialis squatarola: DOWN 28%
• Grey-tailed Tattler Heteroscelus brevipes: DOWN 46%
• Terek Sandpiper Xenus cinereus: DOWN 53%

Few birders outside of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper’s narrow range will have ever seen one and few probably know very much about where it’s found, what threats it faces, and what’s being done to protect it.

As part of our commitment to BirdLife’s Preventing Extinctions Programme we aim to focus on as many of the world’s Critically Endangered and Endangered birds as we can, and next month we will be posting a series of articles and interviews on this unique shorebird - including interviews with Christoph Zockler, the Head of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Recovery Team, Nial Moores of Birds Korea, who is now likely to be the last person on the planet to see a large flock of staging Spoon-billed Sandpipers, and Pieter Wessels of WildSounds, the Species Champions for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper.

We’ve also been given permission to use some of the best photographs of the species I’ve personally ever seen - including shots of chicks (in the hand!), juveniles, and breeding and non-breeding adults.

Simpo, South Korea. April 22 2008
Photo © Richard Chandler. Used with permission.

We will also be posting details of an Appeal for donations which will be used to fund a trip by Christoph and members of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Recovery Team to Myanmar to survey critical wintering areas and implement important conservation measures. We’ll be kickstarting this appeal with a donation of 100GBP/160USD, and if you’d like to contribute any sum large or small you’ll be very welcome to join us.

By the end of the series we hope to have presented the most current data on this beautiful and incredibly rare shorebird that we can (which is not to say we have all the data or all the photographs we’d like: please share any data/experiences or photographs you may have with us by emailing me at charlie10000birds@gmail.com). Our aim is to put flesh and bones on what to many birders is probably no more than a name in a book, or a potential tick on a world list. By looking at what’s caused its decline we’ll also be looking at factors affecting many of the region’s threatened waterbirds - factors affecting birds, in fact, all over the world.

It’s shaping up to be a fascinating series, one I hope will inspire many more birders to get involved in this fantastic and Critically Endangered bird’s conservation.