No shorebird on Earth looks like it: a bird the size of a sparrow with a black spoon at the end of its face.Source 1Source 2
It uses the spoon as a shovel, lifting wet sand and mud in search of invertebrates.Source 1
In breeding plumage its head and breast flame reddish-brown above a white, black-spotted belly.Source 2Source 1
Twice a year it flies 8,000 kilometers along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, a superhighway shared with fifty million waterbirds.Source 1
The flyway is losing its rest stops: when four hundred square kilometers of mudflat at Saemangeum were walled off, the hundreds of spoonies that stopped there fell to one.Source 1
On the wintering grounds, young birds are caught in mist nets set for larger waders.Source 3
So conservation follows the whole route. In Chukotka, eggs go into incubators and chicks into aviaries — headstarting that lifts their survival five-fold.Source 1Source 4
In Myanmar's Gulf of Mottama, more than 80 percent of hunters have agreed to stop, and report better livelihoods.Source 1
The decline has slowed from 26 percent a year to under ten — not saved, but no longer in freefall.Source 1
To witness the spoon-billed sandpiper is to hold the whole flyway in mind — every mudflat a link in an 8,000-kilometer chain.Source 1Source 4
