© Saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper
A new website for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper project has now been opened since last June 2012 and the website is kindly hosted by WWT. The project is supported by WWT, RSPB and Save our Species, with additional financial contributions and support from the EAAFP, BirdLife International, CMS, AWSG-Birds Australia, Heritage Expeditions, the BBC Wildlife Fund, Avios, the Olive Herbert Charitable Trust, the Oriental Bird Club, British Airways Communities & Conservation Scheme, Swarovski Optik and many generous individuals.
The East Asian – Australasian Flyway Partnership Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force estimates that as many as 80-90 % of hunters in the Bay of Martaban, Myanmar, the most important wintering site in the world for spoon-billed sandpiper, have now signed an agreement to stop hunting and surrendered their trapping equipment. But even if everything goes well and winter mortality is halved every five years from 2011, population modeling shows that the population will still be at an extremely low level and highly vulnerable to extinction for more than a decade. Without spoon-billed sandpipers in captivity, there would be no safely net against extinction in the wild.
