The Spoon-billed Sandpiper on the 100 most threatened species list

The Spoon-billed Sandpiper was included in a published list of the hundred most threatened species on the planet: a compilation drawn from across the taxonomic range rather than from birds alone.

Lists of this kind attract a predictable objection, and it is a fair one. A specialist in ferns or in freshwater invertebrates could assemble a comparable hundred with an equally strong claim, and the selection says as much about which groups have been studied and championed as about which are closest to extinction. There is no neutral method for ranking the extinction risk of a shorebird against that of a moss.

What the lists do achieve is attention, and attention is not evenly distributed either. Broadcast coverage of a hundred-species list reaches an audience that a population survey does not, and for a species whose main threats are land reclamation and trapping, both of which turn on political and economic decisions rather than on ecology, public attention is part of the mechanism.

The reasonable position is probably to hold both: the ranking is arbitrary at the margins, and the species genuinely belonged on it.