Reporting
The East Asian-Australasian Flyway: its routes, and the places on them
A shorebird that breeds in Arctic Russia and winters in South and South-East Asia has to refuel somewhere in between. That somewhere is the Yellow Sea, and most of this site's conservation reporting is about what is happening to it. A second route on the map belongs to a river duck with a quite different problem.
- Chukotka — Breeding grounds. The Arctic Russian coast where the species nests, and where the survey and egg-collection work is done. Read the page.
- Kamchatka — On passage. On the route south from the breeding grounds. Read the page.
- Saemangeum — Staging site, walled off. A 33km sea wall closed in 2006 and enclosed more than 40,000 hectares of tidal flat. Read the page.
- Incheon and Ganghwa — Tidal flats under proposal. Two tidal power plants promoted as green infrastructure, at the top of the Yellow Sea. Read the page.
- Rudong — Staging site. The Jiangsu mudflats, and the argument that work at either end of the flyway fails without them. Read the page.
- Yellow Sea — The refuelling stop. The tidal flats the species depends on between breeding and wintering. Reclamation removes the refuelling capacity. Read the page.
- Gulf of Mottama, Myanmar — Wintering grounds. One of the wintering areas named in the reporting, alongside Bangladesh. Read the page.
- Slimbridge — Off the flyway: captive breeding. Where birds taken from Chukotka as eggs are held, and the reason the recovery programme has a European end at all. Read the page.
- Tianjin wetlands — Migration stopover. Oriental Storks were found poisoned at a wetland the species uses on migration, and the rescue and the public anger that followed came from inside China. Read the page.
- Rivers of the Russian Far East — Breeding rivers. Scaly-sided Merganser breeds along clear, fast rivers here and in north-eastern China, nesting in cavities in mature bankside trees. Read the page.
- Rivers of the Republic of Korea — Wintering rivers, engineered. Wintering Scaly-sided Mergansers use rivers here, and the Four Rivers Project applied dredging, weirs and bank clearance across the main systems. Read the page.
- Western Japan — Wintering range. A Black-faced Spoonbill was found here entangled in discarded fishing tackle: a threat that does not appear on the standard list at all. Read the page.
- North-eastern China — Contracted range. Jankowski's Bunting was locally common across the Russian Far East, north-eastern China and Korea within living memory, and is now confined to a few Chinese sites. Read the page.
- Nanning, Guangxi — Urban site guide. People's Park in the Guangxi capital, and the case for treating a city park seriously rather than as a consolation. Read the page.
Why a mudflat in Jiangsu decides what happens in Chukotka
The Spoon-billed Sandpiper uses the Yellow Sea tidal flats on migration between its breeding grounds in Arctic Russia and its wintering grounds in South and South-East Asia. Reclamation of those flats removes the refuelling capacity the species depends on, which is why work on the breeding and wintering grounds alone cannot save it.
That is the argument running under almost everything filed here under conservation, and it is why the same few place names keep returning. A sea wall at Saemangeum, a tidal power proposal at Incheon, reclamation at Rudong: each is a local decision, and each removes a stop from a route that has no spare ones. 14 of the places on the globe above have a page on this site behind them.
A staging site is not interchangeable with any patch of coast
The reason the same few names keep returning is that they are not substitutes for one another. A bird arriving on the Yellow Sea has to put on enough weight to complete the next leg, and it has to do that where the food is: on intertidal flats that are exposed twice a day and rich enough to refuel a flock. The remaining flats were already supporting their own populations before any of them were reclaimed, so the birds displaced from a walled-off site are not absorbed elsewhere. That is why the reporting treats a sea wall as a subtraction from the whole route over a local change.
It also explains why the recovery work has an end in Gloucestershire. Birds taken from Chukotka as eggs are reared at Slimbridge, thousands of kilometres off the flyway, because the wild population is small enough that a captive stock is worth holding. That effort and the effort on the breeding grounds both depend on the middle of the route surviving.
The places, and what happened at each
The markers are not evenly weighted. Some are where the birds are, some are where a decision was taken, and a few are both.
Saemangeum is the clearest single loss. A 33km sea wall closed in 2006 and enclosed more than 40,000 hectares of tidal flat on the Korean west coast. It is the reference case for what a staging site is worth, because the before and after were both counted. Rudong, on the Jiangsu coast, is where the argument was made in the other direction: a survey week there recorded at least 106 Spoon-billed Sandpipers, possibly more than a third of the world population, on flats under threat of reclamation. One site, holding a third of a species, at a point in the year when it has nowhere else to be.
Incheon and Ganghwa sit at the top of the Yellow Sea and carry a complication the other sites do not. Two tidal power plants were proposed there and promoted as green infrastructure, and they would have destroyed internationally important intertidal habitat to generate renewable electricity. That is not a conflict between development and conservation in the usual shape, and it is the reason the proposal attracted the argument it did before simple opposition.
Tianjin is on the map for a different reason again. Oriental Storks were found poisoned at a wetland the species uses on migration, and what followed came from inside China instead of from international organisations working at the edges: the rescue effort, the coverage, the public anger. The reporting treats that as the significant part. At the two ends of the route, Chukotka is where the species nests and where the survey and egg-collection work is done, and the Gulf of Mottama is one of the wintering areas named in the reporting, alongside Bangladesh.
A second bird, and a different way to lose a river
The blue line on the globe belongs to the Scaly-sided Merganser, and it is there because it fails differently. This is a river duck, not a shorebird. It breeds along clear, fast-flowing rivers in the Russian Far East and north-eastern China, feeding on fish taken in fast water and nesting in cavities in mature trees standing along the bank. Wintering birds use rivers too, in the Republic of Korea, China and further south.
What that adds up to is a bird needing two things at once that river engineering removes separately: fast clear water with fish in it, and old trees along the bank with holes in them. South Korea's Four Rivers Project applied dredging, impoundment and bank clearance across the country's main systems, and the wintering rivers were among them. The account of one stretch near Andong, counted in 2000, in 2012 and again thirteen months later, is where that becomes a number rather than a mechanism.
Set beside the sandpiper the contrast is useful. One bird loses a place to stop; the other loses a combination of conditions along a place it never leaves. A flyway is not only a line between two grounds, and a map that showed only the shorebird would suggest that it is.
The distances are the argument
End to end, the sandpiper route drawn here runs to something over eight thousand kilometres, and the Yellow Sea sits near the middle of it. That is the whole case in one number. A bird that has flown three thousand kilometres from Kamchatka and has three thousand more to fly to Myanmar cannot treat the flats in between as optional, and it cannot carry the fuel for both legs at once.
The figures the globe reports are great-circle values computed from the coordinates of the markers themselves, and the page prints the total the globe calculated rather than one typed into this sentence. A distance quoted in prose can drift away from the line drawn for it; one taken from the geometry cannot.
What the globe shows, and what it does not
Only places this site actually reports on. It is a map of the coverage rather than an atlas of the flyway, so a site that matters to the birds but has no page here is not on it. The route drawn between the markers is the one the reporting describes; the distances the globe states are computed from the coordinates rather than written by hand, so a number and the line it belongs to cannot disagree.
About the flyway and this reporting
What is a flyway?
The broad route a migratory population follows between its breeding and wintering grounds, together with the places it must stop at on the way. A flyway is only as good as its weakest staging site.
Why does the Yellow Sea matter so much?
Because it is where the birds refuel, and there is no second option. The flats sit halfway along a route with Arctic tundra at one end and tropical coast at the other, so a bird arriving there has already spent most of what it was carrying. Ground that is walled off stops being food, and the fuel for the second half of the journey has to come from somewhere.
Can work on the breeding and wintering grounds make up for losing a staging site?
No, and that is the thread running under this reporting. A nest site with nothing to eat between it and the wintering ground is not a nest site that produces adults. The middle of the route has no spare stops to lose.
Why is a river duck on a map about tidal flats?
Because it fails differently, and the difference is the point. The Scaly-sided Merganser needs fast clear water AND old bank-side trees with cavities in them, and dredging, weirs and bank clearance take those away separately. Nothing goes missing from the middle of its year; the whole river it lives on is degraded instead. Both are flyway failures, and they do not look alike.
How far is the route?
Something over eight thousand kilometres end to end, with the Yellow Sea near the middle. The globe reports each leg as a great-circle distance computed from the markers' own coordinates, so a stated figure and the line drawn for it cannot disagree.
What happened at Saemangeum?
It was walled off. A sea wall 33km long was completed in 2006 across one of the most important shorebird sites in East Asia, sealing over 40,000 hectares of tidal flat away from the sea. Counts exist from both before and after, which is what makes it the reference case.
Why is Slimbridge on the map when it is not on the flyway?
Because the captive breeding programme is part of the same story. Birds taken from Chukotka as eggs are held there, which is why a recovery effort for an East Asian shorebird has a European end at all.
Are all the flyway’s important sites shown?
No. What is mapped is the coverage, not the flyway. Somewhere the birds depend on will be absent simply because nothing here was written about it, and the map should not be read as a list of what counts.