Animal of the Week, November 13, 2011 -- spoonbilled sandpiper

A couple of years ago, Chris Packham—a man who is currently peppering BBC's Autumnwatch series with titles of songs by The Damned—suggested that the giant panda should be allowed to go to extinction as the effort to save this evolutionary dead end would detract from more achievable conservation goals.

Recently, Murray Rudd of the University of York, UK did a survey to find out what conservation scientists thought of the idea. Turns out that 60% of scientists were in favour of some sort of triage system that might see some of the most endangered charismatic species put on palliative care until they breathe their last. Though specific species weren't named, one might guess at some of the species that might be included, they'd be the really rare ones that cost a lot to maintain—giant pandas, tigers, Javan rhinoceroses perhaps... And perhaps this week's animal, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus (the spoonbilled sandpiper).

As part of an effort to save the small wading birds from extinction, 13 individuals have been brought to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, from the breeding grounds in Chukotka—a peninsular in Russia's  far northeast (so far east that a bit of it is in the western hemisphere). With just fewer than 100 breeding pairs, habit loss and hunting on migratory routes to their southeast Asian wintering grounds could drive these birds to extinction in the wild in the next few years. Conservationists hope that if they can educate the people who hunt the birds and protect breeding grounds and stop-off points on the migratory routes they will one day be able to release the offspring of these captive birds back into the wild.


For the large part, these birds look like most other waders (small, brown, speckled, and indistinguishable to non-serious birders), but their odd spatulate bill used to filter small invertebrates from silt in shallow water sets them apart.

And herein lies the problem with a conservation triage scenario—people, including scientists, care more about certain things than others. Your passionate bird conservationists will want to save the spoon billed sandpiper, your tiger conservationist the tiger, whereas your scuba diver will probably want to protect coral reefs and let the sandpipers shuffle off to the last post. Triage might be a rational idea, but I guess consensus might be difficult to achieve.