Places Note
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.
“All our efforts to safeguard the breeding area in Russia and most important wintering sites in Myanmar and Bangladesh will be in vain if we are unable to protect the Rudong mudflats.” The line is Dr Christoph Zöckler’s, and it states the problem in the Spoon-billed Sandpiper’s flyway more directly than any survey figure.
Zöckler, coordinator of the EAAFP Spoon-billed Sandpiper Task Force, recorded this conversation after returning from Rudong on the Chinese coast, where he had joined a Chinese team surveying the tidal flats. A week’s counting there produced a minimum of 106 Spoon-billed Sandpipers, against the population estimates then current, potentially more than a third of every individual alive.
That concentration is the reason the site matters so disproportionately. A migratory shorebird needs somewhere to refuel on a journey of thousands of kilometres, and when a large share of a species uses one stretch of mudflat, the loss of that stretch is not a partial setback. Rudong was under pressure from the same coastal reclamation that has removed tidal flats along much of the Yellow Sea.
The episode is the clearest statement in this series of why conservation for this species cannot be organised around the breeding grounds alone.