Endangered specie by Claudia Sonea

Britain-based conservation group BirdLife International was happy to announce on Thursday that there were discovered in a coastal stretch of Myanmar eighty-four spoon-billed. The discovery brings a lot of joy in the context that the World Conservation Union lists the bird as endangered with only 200 to 300 pairs left in the wild and researchers set out three years ago to search for other winter grounds for the shorebird in South Asia. In early February Russian researchers reported that the number of the tiny birds with speckled brow feathers and a distinctive spoon-shaped bill had dropped 70 percent in the past few years in their breeding sites in Siberia and none had been seen this year in their traditional wintering sites in Bangladesh. Some of the causes that leads to their extinction are shrimp farms and salt pans in Bangladesh to coastal development in China and South Korea and all are caused by their complicated migration, thus it is essential for researcher to identify and conserve not only its breeding sites, but its migration stopover sites and wintering grounds too says Simba Chan, senior conservation manager at BirdLife's Asia Division. The discovery of 84 birds wintering in Myanmar â€" only one of which appears to have come from Siberia â€" raises the prospect of breeding grounds elsewhere, BirdLife said. Due to historical data and satellite research the birds' migration route was identified to be from Siberia down through Japan, North Korea, South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan, to their main wintering grounds in South Asia. Researchers tried to track down the migration stopovers, but in India they did not discovered anything, in Bangladesh only a handful of birds and finally in Myanmar they found the birds at Arakan in the Bay of Bengal, and Martaban Bay near the Thai border. Christopher Zockler, part of the international survey team that also included Thai, Japanese and Russian bird experts, said spoon-billed sandpipers are just one of a string of rare birds found recently in Myanmar; two years ago, experts found the only other known population of Gurney's Pitta outside of Thailand in Myanmar. As it is, the team of researchers spoke with the government about designating protected areas where the spoon-billed sandpipers were found. The problem is that the region is developing fast and if some measures are not taken soon, the natural environment of the birds might be spoiled. Good luck to them and for their efforts to get shape.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080214/ap_on_sc/myanmar_sandpiper_discovery;_ylt=AgLFRkCbbGA_lrbigBKSpOas0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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