Britain

1

• 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.

Iberia

2

• Monfragüe, Spain — Dehesa and crags. A managed landscape of widely spaced oaks worked for centuries, and one of the richest cultural landscapes in Europe for wildlife. Read the page.
• The Extremadura steppes — Open farmland. Cereal, fallow and rough grazing around Cáceres and Trujillo, holding birds that are hard to find anywhere else in Europe. Read the page.

The Mediterranean

3

• Ulcinj Saltpans, Montenegro — Wetland for sale. A working saltpan on the Adriatic flyway, abandoned as an industry and coveted as a development site. Read the page.
• Malta — Spring hunting season. Monitoring camps in 2011 recorded nearly 950 shots outside hunting hours and dozens of protected birds shot at. Read the page.
• Cyprus — Songbird trapping. Migrant songbirds caught in mist nets and on limesticks, at a scale that surprises people. Read the page.

Turkey and the Levant

3

• Burdur Lake, Turkey — Shrinking closed basin. A Ramsar site that held most of the world's wintering White-headed Ducks into the early 1990s. Upstream abstraction has taken 47 per cent of its water and the ducks have moved to Lake Manyas. Read the page.
• Hasankeyf, Turkey — Under a reservoir. The Ilisu Dam on the Tigris would submerge a site said to meet nine of the ten UNESCO World Heritage criteria, along with the river habitat around it. Read the page.
• The Mesopotamian Marshes, Iraq — Restoration. The marshes Nature Iraq works to bring back, and the argument for dreaming big about them. Read the page.

North Africa

2

• Lake Qarun, Egypt — Protected area, developed. A Protected Area under Egyptian law and a recognised Important Bird Area, proposed for a large resort development along its shoreline. Read the page.
• The Egyptian north coast — Trapping ground. Small birds crossing the Mediterranean southbound arrive at the end of their reserves, flying low, and drop into the first cover they find. Read the page.

West Africa

1

• Ebbaken, Nigeria — Winter roost. European Barn Swallows gather in West African roosts of hundreds of thousands of birds, and ringing here connects them to breeding populations far north. Read the page.

East Africa

2

• Kinangop Plateau, Kenya — Endemic grassland. High, cold tussock grassland on the eastern flank of the Aberdares, holding birds that occur nowhere else on earth. Read the page.
• Nairobi, Kenya — Site guide. A capital with an improbable bird list, because highland, plains and river-valley habitats meet at the edge of the built area. Read the page.

The Indian Ocean

1

• Mauritius — Recovery. The island where extinction became a familiar idea, and where the Echo Parakeet came back from a handful of individuals. Read the page.

North-east Asia

6

• 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.
• 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.

The Yellow Sea

5

• 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.
• 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.

South-east Asia

2

• Gulf of Mottama, Myanmar — Wintering grounds. One of the wintering areas named in the reporting, alongside Bangladesh. 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.

The Atlantic and Caribbean

2

• Bermuda — Rediscovery. The Cahow was gone within about thirty years of settlement, and was rediscovered in 1951. Read the page.
• Puerto Rico — Endemic. The San Pedrito, a six-gram endemic most visitors hear long before they see. Read the page.

The Neotropics

2

• Galápagos — Rarest of the finches. The Mangrove Finch is reduced to two small mangrove patches on one island, with a parasitic fly killing nestlings faster than the birds can replace them. Read the page.
• Rogitama, Boyacá, Colombia — A hummingbird question. A private nature reserve in north-eastern Colombia, and the filmed bird that raised the question of the Bogotá Sunangel. Read the page.

• Burdur Lake: the wintering site the White-headed Ducks left

  A closed basin in south-western Turkey once held most of the world's wintering White-headed Ducks. It has lost 47% of its water, and the ducks moved on.

• The Extremadura steppes: bustards and open country

  Beyond the oak dehesa, the plains of Extremadura hold Great and Little Bustard, sandgrouse and larks, and require an entirely different way of looking.

• Monfragüe and the dehesa: birding Extremadura

  A dawn in Parque Nacional de Monfragüe, and what makes the managed oak landscape around it one of the best raptor areas in Europe.

• Three birding sites around Nairobi

  A capital city with an improbable bird list. Three accessible sites, a golf club in coffee, museum grounds and grassland by the park, and what each is for.

• Ulcinj Saltpans: could tourism save a Montenegrin wetland?

  A working saltpan on the Adriatic flyway, abandoned as an industry and coveted as a development site. What was at stake, and why tourism cut both ways.

Notesshort entries, not full articles

• African Bird Club, BOC and the NHM: a day of short interviews

  Six speakers on the Liben Lark, Lesser Crested Terns in Libya, restoring the lost avifauna of the Mascarenes, and travel in rarely visited parts of Africa.

• Christoph Zöckler on the Rudong tidal flats

  A survey week at Rudong recorded at least 106 Spoon-billed Sandpipers, possibly a third of the world population, on mudflats threatened with reclamation.

• Development on the shoreline of Lake Qarun

  A resort proposed on the shore of a protected Egyptian lake recognised for its wintering waterbirds and breeding Slender-billed Gulls.

• Lekki Conservation Centre: birding a fenced reserve in Lagos

  A 78-hectare swamp and savannah reserve on the Lekki Peninsula, the species a visit recorded there, and what the access problem actually is.

• People's Park, Nanning: birding a city park in Guangxi

  An urban park in subtropical southern China, and what city parks are actually good for when you have a few hours and no transport.

Common questions

Are these guides current?

They describe the places as they were when the reporting was done, and several of the visits are some years old. The habitat descriptions age slowly; access arrangements, permits and facilities age quickly, so check those locally before travelling.

Why is there a globe on this page?

Because the places are scattered across several continents and a list does not show that. The globe indexes everywhere the site reports from, drawn from the same dataset that generates the article listing, so every marker has a page behind it.

What is dehesa?

A managed Iberian landscape of widely spaced Holm and Cork Oaks over grazed grassland, worked for centuries for timber, cork, acorns and livestock. It is not wild country, and it supports species that intensive farmland and closed forest both exclude, which is why it recurs in the Extremadura accounts.

Does a place need to be a reserve to be covered?

No. A city park, an unprotected saltpan and a stretch of farmland all appear here. What matters is whether the place is worth describing, and unprotected sites are often the ones where the reporting has something to say.