Species Note
Christoph Zöckler: an update from Slimbridge
Recorded a week after the first Spoon-billed Sandpipers reached Slimbridge, on the breeding programme, hunting on the wintering grounds, and reclamation.
This conversation with Dr Christoph Zöckler of ArcCona Consulting, coordinator of the EAAFP Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force, was recorded less than a week after the thirteen Spoon-billed Sandpipers held at Slimbridge as the founder group of the conservation breeding programme had been seen at close quarters.
Zöckler had spent more than a decade surveying the Russian breeding grounds and had been closely involved in setting the programme up. The discussion covered three strands that were running at once and depended on each other.
The first was the captive population itself: what thirteen birds can and cannot do as an insurance against extinction, and what would need to happen before reinforcement of the wild population was a realistic prospect.
The second was hunting on the wintering grounds. Trapping in South and South-East Asia had been identified as a major source of mortality, and work with trapping communities to change that was one of the few interventions with a measurable short-term effect.
The third was land reclamation. The tidal flats the species depends on during migration were being converted at scale, and, as the conversation made plain, success on the breeding grounds and the wintering grounds counts for very little if the staging sites between them disappear.