Foster care rare birds return home to breed
Spoonievision tonight 8pm - first footage and behind-the-scenes interviews
Rare spoon-billed sandpipers that were fostered by conservationists have returned home to breed in numbers for the first time.
Five birds that were taken into captivity as eggs a year ago, and raised by WWT’s expert bird keepers till they fledged, have returned to Siberia from their 10,000 mile migration to south east Asia. Three of them went on to mate and produce their own eggs, which will help to stabilise the population of this critically endangered and very tiny bird – there are fewer than 100 pairs left in the wild which together weigh less than a single mute swan.
Tonight at 8pm TV’s Kate Humble will host ‘Spoonievision’, a special live broadcast that will take viewers behind the scenes of the international effort to save the spoon-billed sandpiper, one of nature’s strangest and rarest creatures.
Viewers will get the first chance to see footage from the Russian breeding grounds and meet the experts who masterminded the plan to save the spoon-billed sandpiper. Kate will take viewers live to the spoon-billed sandpiper breeding project that is being run in parallel at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, where WWT’s expert bird keepers learned to raise this species by hand and then take those skills to Siberia.
WWT’s Head of Conservation Breeding, Nigel Jarrett said:
“The art of fostering birds is still in its pioneering stages. For the spoon-billed sandpiper, which is unique in many ways and migrates ten thousand miles, we inevitably started off with unknowns. But because the situation was so dire we decided we had to act.
“The most crucial thing for the project – the real test of the birds we reared – has always been whether they would come back to breed. So far they seem to be doing at least as well as the birds reared by real avian parents, which means what we’re doing is working and the birds are fit and healthy.
“But saving the spoon-billed sandpiper is about far more than releasing birds. In fact, it’s about more than the birds themselves, it’s about the wetland places and the people that they need to survive.
“Telling its story is crucial, and we’re delighted that at 8pm tonight Kate Humble will present Spoonievision, a very special one-off live broadcast to show viewers around the world the latest footage and take them behind-the-scenes in a way that has not been possible before.”
Anyone wanting to watch Spoonievision should visit www.wwt.org.uk/spoonievision or simply search for Spoonievision.
Spoonievision has been made possible by Telestream®, the leading provider of digital video tools and workflow solutions, who are providing their Wirecast live video streaming software for free.
