Spoon-billed Sandpiper: Part Three - interview with Nial Moores

I’ve been involved with Spoon-billed Sandpiper conservation for much of this decade, thanks entirely to my brother Nial Moores (photo left) who has lived and breathed shorebird conservation for over fifteen years - first in Japan, and then South Korea (where he’s now lived for ten years). A series on the Spoon-billed Sandpiper without his input would be unthinkable in my opinion: he has been warning that large scale reclamation of wetlands (estuarine tidal-flats principally) would threaten ...

the Spoon-billed Sandpiper and many other shorebird species for many years, and tried desperately hard to get the world to halt the massive Saemangeum Reclamation Project - a South Korean development project that involved constructing a 33km sea-wall which eventually (in April 2006) cut off over 40,000ha of what had been almost certainly the most important shorebird staging site in East Asia: by 25 April, 2006, only four days after seawall closure, incidentally, “shellfish beds in the enclosed area started to die. By the end of May, most were dead, and water quality was already deteriorating rapidly”. Together we set up what became Birds Korea (which only exists in its present form because of his determination and vision) and together we devised the Saemangeum Shorebird Monitoring Programme (SSMP), a study which scientifically proved that removing such an enormous area of critically important habitat would devastate shorebird populations (it’s obvious, but it needed proving).

In the following interview - which was written from long Skype conservations - there are many references to Saemangeum, the SSMP, and to Birds Korea. I make no apologies whatsoever for that, because without understanding the impact of the enormous changes that are destroying so much shorebird habitat in East Asia it is impossible to understand why the Spoon-billed Sandpiper now faces extinction. And there is no doubt at all that unless the ongoing habitat changes are stopped by organisations like Birds Korea, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper will just be at the top of what will become a depressingly long list of shorebirds disappearing from our planet for ever…

Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Yubu Island, South Korea, 15 October 2008

Photo copyright Kjetil Schjolberg

Charlie: Nial, in an introduction to this interview yesterday I said that you are “one of the last birders/conservationists who will ever see a large flock of Spoon-billed Sandpipers on migration”. Can I just put that statement into context for people reading this interview: how many were in the group you saw, where and when did you see them, how did you feel seeing so many Spoon-billed Sandpipers in one place, and how do you feel now that such large staging groups seem to be confined to history?

NM: It was at Saemangeum on South Korea’s west coast, formerly the single most important known shorebird site in the whole of the Yellow Sea, back in September in the late 1990s. At that time high-tide at Saemangeum was a phenomenal spectacle: in one huge roost there were 50,000 Great Knot, tens of thousands of Dunlin, which come to Korea from breeding grounds in Alaska as well as Siberia, hundreds of Broad-billed Sandpipers and Red-necked Stints, and this long thin line of Spoon-billed Sandpipers – 75 in a single scan. There might have been quite a few more mixed in with the other stints and sandpipers of course, and one researcher claims that he saw 150 at the same roost the very next day. After living in Japan for eight years where a “flock” of two Spoon-billed Sandpipers had already become a noteworthy event, this was simply one of the best birding highs to be had.

To know this, and then to have monitored this whole area as it was dyked and damned and made into an ecological desert as part of the world’s largest reclamation project…devastating. It’s not just the loss of habitat for the Spoon-billed Sands of course. All the other shorebirds that depended on the site have lost their optimal staging site, and over twenty thousand people have lost their livelihoods. All for some mega-project with no clear end-use…

Charlie: Devastating and heart-breaking…We’ll talk again about Saemangeum later in the interview, Nial - I don’t think anyone can discuss the Spoon-billed Sandpiper without talking about Saemangeum - but first can I ask you about the Spoon-billed Sandpiper itself. It’s often described as ‘unique’. Physically of course it is ‘unique’ but there’s more to the species than that. You’ve probably seen more Spoon-billed Sandpipers than most people alive today: what’s so special about them?

NM: Shorebirds as a group of species are absolutely amazing. Scanning some grey-brown tidal-flat it’s often hard to pick out any birds at all. But look closer…you start to see the birds, and then the details of the legs and bills. Watching the way they move, the way that they feed, the way that one species appears to prefer one area of an estuary to another, the way one species tends to prey on one type of food, and it all starts to make sense – of course, all these species are perfectly and even obviously adapted to their habitat, obviously in a way that even we humans can see and understand. And amongst all of these long straight bills, or deeply decurved bills, to then see a shorebird, not that much bigger than a sparrow, but with the bill of a miniature spoonbill – fantastic!

The species for me is something like the avian equivalent of a Duck-billed Platypus. Strikingly different, and still obviously perfectly adapted…But to what? Researchers like Danny Rogers (of the Australasian Waders Study Group) only recently came up with a genuinely decent theory for how they use their bill and we’re still not certain what they feed on…And then add to all of this that the Spoonie breeds in the wilds of Siberia, and migrates to wintering grounds in southern and south-east Asia that were still largely unknown only a few years ago…

It is absolutely no surprise that the Spoon-billed Sandpiper is now one of the “Most Wanted to See” species in the world.

Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Yubu Island, South Korea, 12 September 2007

Photo copyright Nial Moores

Charlie: One of the “Most Wanted to See” species but getting increasingly harder to see anywhere.

NM: Absolutely. It’s declining at a huge rate and sites that used to be hold staging birds no longer do – including sites here in South Korea of course.

Charlie: There were some seen in South Korea this year though?

NM: Yes, there are still some Spoon-billed Sandpipers making it up and down the Flyway. In September for example here in Korea there were four juveniles at the Nakdong Estuary in Busan and another 7 in the Geum Estuary - 4 adults and three more 3 juveniles. So 11 so far this autumn, but that’s down from highs a decade ago of probably several hundred.

Charlie: It’s a relief that there were at least some juveniles seen…

NM: Yes, a relief. But the numbers are now so very small, and even the two remaining sites where the birds are found annually are threatened each in their own way.

Charlie: So the situation facing the Spoon-billed Sandpiper is - at best - dire.

NM: Yes. At best.

Charlie: This is the sort of question that I don’t think should even be asked, but I’ll ask anyway: does it matter if the Spoon-billed Sandpiper goes extinct?

NM: Yes, of course it does. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper should absolutely be conserved. Firstly it’s a unique and charismatic species that has every right to exist in just the same way that we do.

Secondly it’s a very important indicator species of dynamic estuarine systems. It’s an often repeated line in conservation, but it is the canary in the coalmine if you like. If we allow the Spoon-billed Sandpiper to disappear then we are accepting that the destruction of estuaries and tidal-flats through seawalls and dams is somehow ‘okay’; that we can simply carry on destroying such places. We can’t. Estuaries and tidal-flats are among the most naturally productive ecosystems on the planet, and they provide multiple benefits and “services”, from hatcheries for many fish species, to carbon sink, to buffers against flooding and storm surges. Humans, birds, fish, benthos - so many life-forms need estuaries and wetlands. Destroying wetlands - and we have destroyed and continue to destroy and degrade vast areas of wetlands around the world - is madness in the long-term.

The rapid decline in the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, in the Red Knots in North America, indeed the ongoing and accelerating decline of almost half of all the shorebird species around the world, is telling us something. Are we really all too busy or too arrogant to listen and to do something before it’s too late? If we lose such species, if we lose such ecosystems, then what hope for the next generation of people, our children? Or for the generation after that?

The terrible decline of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, the increase in the number of critically endangered bird species around the world [192 as of 2009], needs to be a wake up call… at the very least to all of us who already watch birds and call ourselves birders, for all of us who feel a connection to the natural world. There are already enough of us to help bring change…

Saemangeum sea wall, photo copyright Birds Korea

Charlie: If - and it is still ‘if’ rather than ‘when’ - the Spoon-billed Sandpiper does go extinct how key will the reclamation of Saemangeum have been do you think?

NM: The loss of the Saemangeum wetlands will have been key on many different levels.

Saemangeum was the single most important staging site for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper - and for many other shorebird species - in the Yellow Sea, and the Yellow Sea is THE core area for staging shorebirds on the whole of the East Asian-Australasian flyway. The destruction of the Saemangeum tidal-flats was a huge loss. Our Saemangeum Shorebird Monitoring program, our national shorebird surveys, and the Monitoring Yellow Sea Migrants in Australia program all confirm that the Saemangeum reclamation, and reclamation elsewhere, is causing rapid declines in shorebird numbers on our Flyway.

Charlie: Just as you predicted some fifteen years ago…

NM: As anyone who looked at the area and saw what was depending on it predicted - or should have predicted anyway.

Charlie: Saemangeum is ‘gone but not forgotten’ though?

NM: Absolutely not. It’s important to point out that Samangeum was an estuarine system that also supported the livelihoods of 20 - 25,000 people and numerous other bird species. Whatever gets built on the reclaimed land, whatever jobs are created, those original livelihoods are gone. The conservation of that site - that incredibly important site - could have offered a wonderful example of genuinely sustainable development where you maintain local culture, support local livelihoods, where you maintain or even improve the system that allowed people and birds to survive in such a specialised habitat. Samangeum should have been the example that allowed millions of people to understand that reclamation, the conversion of natural wetland into land, has many more costs than benefits, that conservation makes far more sense in every way. Now with much of the area like a dusty desert, the Saemangeum wetlands should either be restored immediately, or instead their demise should be used to show to the world the terrible impacts of “reclamation”. Saemangeum needs to be understood not as a new Venice in Asia as being touted by developers recently, but rather as a monument to misguided policy and an economic model that elsewhere is leading to the obliteration of the world’s primary forests, to the mass plunder of the oceans, to the warming of our planet…If it continues, this kind of unsustainable development, supporting and supported by our lifestyles, it will in time make the recent Wall Street meltdown look ridiculous and trivial in comparison.

So if we stop talking about Saemangeum, fail to explain the impacts, fail to make decision-makers understand the position the Spoon-billed Sandpiper now finds itself in then there will be little left with which we can all challenge reclamation projects in China, or in other parts of the Yellow Sea such as coastal DPRK (North Korea), around the world even. Through research we now have the scientific proof of the terrible impacts on shorebirds of a huge reclamation like Saemangeum. Simply we must keep talking about Saemangeum and its devastating effects…we must not let people forget, we must use this terrible example to wake people up to the destruction of so much of our planet…

Saemangeum April 2006, photo copyright Birds Korea

Saemangeum April 2007, photo copyright Birds Korea

Saemangeum April 2008, photo copyright Birds Korea

Charlie: You mentioned North Korea there. There’s the threat now of reclamation projects in the North too?

NM: There has been some large-scale reclamation there already, for example to make the West Sea Barrage. It would also be wise to assume that re-unification of the Korean peninsula will take place at some point, and if present development models remain in place then it seems inevitable that there would be massive pressure for further reclamation there too after re-unification.

Charlie: Conservation in Korea seems to constantly throwing up new challenges. You must feel a little like Sisyphus pushing his rock uphill only to keep seeing it roll back down again! How do you and Birds Korea counter those challenges?

NM: As you and all the people you meet doing 10,000 Birds know, working for conservation anywhere, not just here, can be very difficult.

In this region, the Yellow Sea Eco-region [which includes coastal China, South and North Korea], we have approximately 10% of the world’s human population yet Birds Korea is still the only environmental NGO that we know of which mentions bird conservation and the Yellow Sea in our mission statement. The pressures on the environment here are immense and though it’s believed that 80% of Korean people would now choose conservation over development there’s a big gap between people’s hopes and recent policy. Short-term economic gain is still favoured over long-term conservation. What we’re trying to do as Birds Korea is communicate domestically (and internationally) the importance and the value of Ramsar, of the Millennium goals, of the conservation of wetlands and bio-diversity. We need to maintain a consistent, well-informed and honest voice, to keep repeating a consistent message, and there are some positives in that more and more people are now understanding what the problems are and they’re supporting more and more what we’re saying, On the other hand though too little is actually being done to conserve avian biodiversity despite all the words….

Charlie: And the Yellow Sea’s avian biodiversity is at great risk?

NM: Yes, absolutely. The Yellow Sea Eco-region is the core breeding range of species like the Black-faced Spoonbill and Chinese Egret, and it also supports huge numbers of birds on migration and in winter. In South Korea, over half of the globally threatened species that occur here regularly are waterbirds, and here, as across the Yellow Sea as a whole, it’s a story of their decline almost everywhere you look. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is obviously right on the edge now, but we’re seeing huge declines in other shorebird species too.

Analysis of count data by Danny [Rogers] and others in the Australasian Wader Study Group on shorebirds at NW Australia’s Eighty Mile Beach - where many of the Yellow Sea’s shorebirds spend the non-breeding season

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