Restore Saemangeum.com: two minutes for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper
By Charlie • September 17, 2007 • 2 commentsA very brief update on Saemangeum, East Asia’s most important known shorebird staging site until 2006 when it was ‘reclaimed’ (for posts on Saemangeum on 10,000 Birds please go The best place I’ve ever been birding, Will this be the last year anyone can post a report like this?, and Miles of Muck), and the neighboring Geum estuary, now the best such site remaining in South Korea.
On September 12th, 2 Nordmann’s Greenshank (an adult and a juvenile) were found in the first area visited within the vast Saemangeum area. There were probably still thousands of shorebirds strung along the shoreline there, feeding in areas wetted not by tides but by extremely heavy late summer rains.
Juvenile Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Geum Estuary, Sept 12, 2007.
Photo © Nial Moores/ Birds Korea
The same day, a visit to the adjacent Geum Estuary found 4 more Nordmann’s Greenshank, and 13 Spoon-billed Sandpiper in a single scan (photo above, for more disgiscope images of this juvenile Spoon-billed Sandpipers please go to: Birds Korea: Latest Birds).
Numbers of Spoon-billed Sandpiper in Korea tend to peak at the end of September. With possibly now only several hundred individuals remaining globally of this critically Endangered species (a recent breeding survey by a team of international observers estimated that there may now be no more than 100 pairs, down from an estimated 350 pairs in 2006), even the 13 found on Sept 12th is likely to be one of highest counts of this species during southward migration in 2007 - anywhere in the world.
And yet this critical site too is still not safe from the threat of reclamation.
There is still, fortunately, a chance to do something.
“Restore Saemangeum” (Forty Thousand Hectares: Forty thousand emails) is a superb website designed and set up by Australian birder and conservationist Rikki Coughlan, where - with just one click - you can send an email of concern to the relevant authorities. Making a direct contribution to conservation couldn’t be easier!
Please go to: http://www.restoresaemangeum.com and register your concerns.
Many readers of 10,000 Birds have their own blogs with their own readers - so please feel free to copy this post and also to pass the Restore Saemangeum URL to other birders and to all and every listserver you can think of.
Sending a mail and forwarding this URL on should only take 2 minutes at most…
Your email WILL make a difference. Emails WILL continue to stimulate concerns in South Korea, and they WILL influence media and government thinking as South Korea prepares to host the next Ramsar Convention conference (in October 2008).
Please take a couple of minutes to help keep the Spoon-billed Sandpiper away from the brink of extinction…
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It was easy to register my concerns with the South Korean Ambassador to the U.S. Please folks, take the literally (for me anyway) 30 seconds and send an email! Don’t let these birds go the way of the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Great Auk…sigh.
[...] We often mention the Ramsar Convention (Ramsar) on 10,000 Birds (most often in the failure of South Korea - a Ramsar signatory - to recognise the Saemangeum wetlands as a Ramsar site, and most recently in our Latest News post about BirdLife’s “Think Pink” campaign to protect Tanzania’s Lake Natron), but I would guess that not so many of us know exactly what The Ramsar Convention is? Well, simply put, The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands, i.e. ‘to stem the progressive encroachment on and loss of wetlands now and in the future, recognizing the fundamental ecological functions of wetlands and their economic, cultural, scientific, and recreational value’. [...]