Tag Archives: Spoon-billed Sandpiper

Surprise! Sandpiper chicks emerge from the Russian lichens

It may not feel like the end of summer where you are, but in arctic Russia, where Gerrit Vyn has been watching endangered Spoon-billed Sandpipers, birds are already headed south. Here’s Gerrit’s description of the closing of the season, complete with a late, surprise encounter with a Spoon-billed Sandpiper and its newly hatched chicks: From [...]

Seventeen Spoon-billed Sandpipers hatch in captivity

  The emergency effort led by Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust to save Spoon-billed Sandpipers got off to a rousing start with a flurry of hatching in the last few days. In all, 17 tiny sandpiper chicks have hatched, right on schedule as the team were transporting eggs from the field site where they have been [...]

Courtship on the Tundra—Spoon-billed Sandpipers [Field Report]

Gerrit Vyn, a producer in our Multimedia program, has been spending the summer in remote eastern Russia filming one of the world’s most endangered birds, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper. In the last post he sent us, he described the plight of this species as well as his first sighting of a Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Here’s his next [...]

Finding Help for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper

In the arctic tundra of eastern Russia, a sparrow-sized shorebird with a one-of-a-kind beak is facing extinction—and a few scientists are doing all they can to save it. In recent years the Spoon-billed Sandpiper‘s population has dropped by a staggering 25 percent per year. Fewer than 200 pairs now remain. So this year, shorebird experts [...]