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Spoon-billed Sandpiper — printable fact sheet
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Spoon-billed Sandpiper
Calidris pygmaea
The spoon-billed sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) is a sparrow-sized wader with a spatulate bill unlike that of any other shorebird, swept side to side through shallow water and soft mud in a scything action that lets it filter tiny invertebrates. It breeds only on a narrow coastal …
Did you know?
- Fewer than 700 adult Spoon-billed Sandpipers are believed to remain in the wild, making them critically close to extinction.
- The spoon-shaped bill is unique among the world's roughly 250 wader species. The whole world population would fit comfortably inside a single small hall. Conservationists take the first clutch from each nest, knowing the pair will simply lay again, then hand-rear the chicks; this "headstarting" roughly doubles the output of every nest. The bird's decline is driven less by anything on its breeding grounds than by the concreting-over of mudflats in the Yellow Sea, thousands of kilometres away.
What I learned
Draw the spoon-billed sandpiper
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