Kolkata: A spoon-billed sandpiper, a critically endangered shorebird, has been photographed near Bakkhali on Sunday. According to birder and founder member of Birdwatchers’ Society (BWS), Sandip Das, who first spotted and clicked the bird at Patibunia beach near Bakkhali on Sunday, this is the second photographic record of the bird in Bengal. “Its first photographic record from Bengal came in Apr, 2018. It’s critically endangered with hardly 500 individuals surviving in the wild now. They are now being captively bred and released in the wild. The bird that we photographed on Sunday didn’t have any ring on its legs. It seems to be wild-bred,” he added. Spoon-billed sandpipers’ breeding habitat is sea coasts and adjacent hinterland on the Chukchi Peninsula and southwards along the isthmus of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Birders Soumya Aon and Kaustav Khan, also members of BWS, were also present there and clicked the bird on Sunday. The sandpiper was seen on Sunday with other birds like red-necked stint and Tibetan sand plover, which mostly breed in north-eastern parts of Russia. “So, this has probably come from the same region,” Das added. As per a Cornell Lab of Ornithology report, two factors are responsible for the spoon-billed sandpipers’ population decline: the elimination of migratory stopover habitat, particularly in the Yellow Sea region, and subsistence hunting on the wintering grounds.“It is one of many long-distance migrant shorebirds whose populations depend on intertidal habitats to fuel their migrations. In the Yellow Sea, large-scale reclamation projects are draining intertidal areas to convert them to other uses, particularly in rapidly developing countries like China and South Korea. The Saemangeum, the largest seawall in the world, eliminated one of the Yellow Sea’s most important shorebird refueling habitats. It typically hosted a half-million migrating shorebirds negotiating their 15,000-mile round trip journeys between the Southern Hemisphere and arctic Alaska and Russia. The spoon-billed sandpiper is the first of these species to be pushed to the brink of extinction, but others like the great knot may follow if additional development continues as planned,” said the report. At least half the world’s remaining population of spoon-billed sandpipers winters in Myanmar’s Bay of Martaban, where subsistence hunting with nets is a common activity, the report added. According to Das, the last photo record in Bengal in 2018 came from Kargil beach in South 24 Parganas. “That sighting happened on April 1. We have been scanning the region since then every year during this period and finally got the species again on Sunday,” he added. Sources said there are very few reports of the bird from India. As per reports, before the Bengal records, S Balachandran, a scientist of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), had reported its sighting in Tamil Nadu in 1996.
