Hope for sandpipers

The discovery of 84 spoon-billed sandpipers on a coastal stretch of Myanmar offers fresh hope for the birds. This comes only months after Russian researchers reported that numbers of the tiny birds — with their speckled brow feathers and a distinctive spoon-shaped bill — had dropped 70 per cent in the past few years in their breeding sites in Siberia and that none had been seen this year in their traditional wintering sites in Bangladesh, the conservation group BirdLife International said on Thursday. The World Conservation Union lists it as endangered: only 200 to 300 pairs are left in the wild. The discovery of 84 birds wintering in Myanmar earlier this year — only one of which appears to have come from Siberia — raises the prospect of breeding grounds elsewhere. The birds' migration route takes them from Siberia down through Japan, North Korea, South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan, to their main wintering grounds in South Asia. Spoon-billed sandpipers face many threats because of their complicated migration routes. Gathering historical records, satellite data and reports of sightings, researchers set out three years ago to search for other winter grounds for the shorebird in South Asia. After finding none in India and only a handful of birds in Bangladesh, they had finally turned to Myanmar.

The Hindu, February 15, 2008