This year, the EAAFP Secretariat is teaming up with the Oriental Bird Club, BirdLife International and the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force, to launch the #legflagchallenge social media campaign. The #legflagchallenge campaign encourages birdwatchers, bird photographers and all kinds of citizen scientists to observe, document and report sightings of waterbirds in the countries of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
To protect migratory waterbirds and their habitats, it is important to study their migration and obtain information about the sites they use, their habitat preference and migration patterns. Researchers mark migratory waterbirds in different ways, eg, leg flags, leg rings, tags, bands, and other types of attachments. These markers often have different colour combinations indicating where the bird was marked. For more precise marking of individuals, sometimes the leg flags, bands, or tags are engraved with codes of letters or numbers, allowing individual identification of the bird in the field.
Thus, the resightings of birds carrying these leg flags or tags can provide important data about their life histories for professional conservationists and researchers, which in turn, help develop strategies and plans for conservation of migratory waterbirds. One excellent example of a species whose conservation has benefitted greatly are Spoon-billed Sandpipers tagged with legflags in Russia. These birds were eventually spotted by birdwatchers in China, Myanmar and Thailand, allowing scientists to chart their migration and figure out which are the wetlands most important to the species!
Here is this year’s #legflagchallenge challenge:
- Go out to the field and take a photo of migratory waterbirds with leg flags, tags, bands,
- Post it on Facebook, mark the date, locations of the photo taken, species and tag information
- Hashtag #legflagchallenge
- Tag 3 friends to take this challenge
We encourage you to repost the resighting to this Facebook Group: Shorebird leg-flag sightings in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF)
For Black-faced Spoonbill, post here: Black-faced Spoonbill Conservation Network
Two photos per month will be selected from the above two platforms could be featured in the EAAFP 2022 Calendar!
Check the sample:
©Philipp Maleko
