{"id":36712,"date":"2018-09-19T11:40:14","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T15:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/?p=36712"},"modified":"2018-09-27T16:51:36","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T20:51:36","slug":"losing-ground-whats-behind-the-worldwide-decline-of-shorebirds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/losing-ground-whats-behind-the-worldwide-decline-of-shorebirds\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing Ground: What's Behind the Worldwide Decline of Shorebirds?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Autumn 2018<\/a> issue of <\/em>Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now<\/a>.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

More From Living Bird<\/h2>
  • \"Whimbrel<\/figure><\/div>
    Living Bird Autumn 2018\u2014Table of Contents<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Living<\/figure><\/div>
    Living Bird Magazine\u2014Latest Issue<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Living<\/figure><\/div>
    Living Bird Magazine Archives<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/li><\/ul><\/div><\/div>\n

    It is hard to imagine a more altered, manipulated landscape than the one that stretches south from the industrial city of Tangshan, on the Yellow Sea coast of China. More than 100 square miles of former tidal flats have been converted into an endless expanse of salt-making ponds, known as the Nanpu Saltpans\u2014an industry with roots here that stretch back a century or more. But rarely has seawater been evaporated into salt on such an immense scale, an area the size of Tampa.<\/p>\n

    An equal area of \u201creclaimed\u201d land\u2014 what was once coastal mudflat habitat, walled off from the sea and transformed for industrial purposes\u2014now holds a haphazard mix of chemical factory smokestacks, power-plant cooling towers, wind turbines, manufacturing complexes, half a dozen prisons, and an oil drilling and storage facility. It\u2019s a weird mix of factoryscape, briny ponds, and immense mountains of gray-white salt, all part of a massive, half-finished industrial and port complex called the Caofeidian New Area. A partially constructed highway\u2014six lanes of gravel and incomplete paving\u2014runs through the middle. At barely 5 a.m., the road is already rumbling with heavy machinery.<\/p>\n

    \n
    \"Black-bellied
    Black-bellied Plovers feed in South Korea\u2019s Geum Estuary along the Yellow Sea coast, against a backdrop of industrial development. Photo by Gerrit Vyn.<\/em><\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n

    The sun is rising through the low pall of smog and dust that overhangs this region, but Dr. Theunis Piersma is looking away from Nanpu into Bohai Bay, where the high tide has begun to pull back from the seawall on which he stands. The receding water exposes gray mudflats that will, at low ebb, stretch for miles offshore\u2014a tiny fragment of what were once among the largest tidal flats in the world. And on the mud, shorebirds are now gathering, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and soon by the tens of thousands\u2014wave after wave of knots and stints, godwits and turnstones, Terek and Curlew Sandpipers, flying in from their high-tide roosts among the salt ponds, clouds of birds arriving to feed and preen.<\/p>\n

    \"Theunis
    Theunis Piersma (right) conducting research in the Yellow Sea. Image courtesy Chris Hassell.<\/em><\/figcaption>\n <\/figure><\/div>\n

    These flats and the multitudes of shorebirds they attract have drawn Piersma to this part of eastern China for more than a decade. The Dutch scientist from the University of Groningen is a legend in the shorebird world. A nimbus of Piersma\u2019s gray, curly hair blows in the breeze as he trains his spotting scope on a flock feeding on the mud below us\u2014a richly colored subspecies of the Red Knot named in his honor: Calidris canutus piersmai<\/em>. Like dozens of other species of shorebirds, these knots undertake some of the longest migrations of any bird in the world, hemispheric journeys made possible only by this midpoint pit stop of food-rich mudflats along the Chinese and Korean coasts of the Yellow Sea. Here, shorebirds like the knots that have just flown nearly 4,000 miles nonstop from Australia or New Zealand can rest and refuel before continuing on epic flights to the Siberian Arctic or Alaska.<\/p>\n

    The almost incomprehensible level of coastal destruction along the Yellow Sea, of which Caofeidian is just one example, has thrown this global migratory system into grave peril. The numbers of Red Knots, Great Knots, Black-tailed and Bar-tailed Godwits, and many other species have been in freefall for years. Some, like the Spoon-billed Sandpiper and Nordmann\u2019s Greenshank, are among the most critically endangered birds in the world. So Piersma comes to China every spring to join an international team of researchers with a uniquely somber mission\u2014to document, he says, the extinction of some of the world\u2019s greatest migratory shorebirds.<\/p>\n

    Those birds may have received an eleventh-hour reprieve last winter, when the Chinese government made a stunning announcement\u2014a sweeping ban on most further coastal reclamation. Just how effective the new rule will be re mains to be seen, but it was a rare piece of good news for this beleaguered order of birds. Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the gravity\u2014the sheer desperation\u2014of the crisis facing dozens of species of migratory shorebirds in all of the world\u2019s major flyways. The collapse of shorebird numbers is on par with that of the Passenger Pigeon more than a century ago; in fact, the clouds of shorebirds that once filled the sky were often compared with the flying rivers of wild pigeons. But where the Passenger Pigeon\u2019s extinction involved just a single kind of bird, this time the world faces the loss of entire suites of species, as dozens of shorebirds tumble toward the abyss.<\/p>\n

    \n \"\"\n
    A Common Redshank is entangled in a net set by subsistence hunters in Myanmar.\u00a0Photo by Gerrit Vyn.<\/em><\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

    A Migration Haven Becomes a Coastal Hell<\/h3>\n

    For many birds, migration is the most dangerous time of the year, but it has become an especially deadly gantlet for shorebirds. The loss of safe, resource-rich places to rest, refuel, and winter means that increasing numbers of breeding-age adults simply don\u2019t survive the journey, or arrive on the nesting grounds late and in such poor condition that they haven\u2019t the time or energy to breed. Once there, they may find that intensive agriculture has created landscapes unable to support their chicks, or discover they are so out of sync with a rapidly changing climate that their nesting attempts fail year after year. Those with the longest, most dramatic migrations\u2014already delicately balanced between time, distance, weather, food, and physiological ability\u2014are at the greatest and most immediate peril.<\/p>\n

    The threats are global, and examples abound on nearly every continent. In Brazil, kite-surfing is a booming new adventure sport for tourists that can scatter weary migrant shorebirds from the beaches. In the Caribbean, northern South America, and Asia, poaching and subsistence hunting are probably exacting a heavy toll every spring and fall. Everywhere the ocean meets land, where shorebirds prospect for food buried within sand and mud, sea-level rise is submerging coastal wetlands, and in many places humans are fighting back by armoring the remaining shoreline with rock and concrete. Either way, shorebirds are left with no place to feed.<\/p>\n