Saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper

By Nicky Hiscock, Conservation Breeding Assistant

This is our 38th day of showing live footage of the spoon-billed sandpipers to the public via a CCTV link at the conservation breeding facility. Each day at 2.30pm, when the birds are fed, visitors to WWT Slimbridge can watch live video shown on  large screen in a 90-seat cinema. Each feed is commentated – usually by myself but also by Nigel Jarrett, WWT’s Head of Conservation Breeding and one of the team who collected and hatched the spoon-billed sandpiper eggs in Russia last summer. So he knows them well!

While we’d love to allow visitors to see the birds in person, we can’t take any risks with their health care. It’s possible someone might “walk” a disease into the facility and so we have a strict and restrictive entrance policy. However the live footage is definitely the next best thing and the views from the ground-level cameras can be mesmerizing!

The birds, although generally less active during the day, really show off their magnificence to the cameras at 2.30 each day. This is when we visually check their well-being and offer them their favourite food, including live mealworms and brine shrimps. By offering them these titbits we can get extremely close to the birds and observe their behaviours as well as check their physical condition.

During the feed, I talk through the many aspects of how we care for the birds as well as some of the challenges we face day-to-day. You are able to see stunning, close-up views of the birds, whilst I tell you about them and their behaviour and the interesting things, even us aviculturists, learn about the birds day-by-day.

A film of the expedition to Russia to collect the birds as eggs is also shown, just before the live commentated feed, and there’s always a member of staff (often a member of the expedition team) around to answer questions.

So if you’re in the area, please pop in to see the spoon-billed sandpipers performing for the camera!

By Nicky Hiscock, Conservation Breeding Assistant

The sandpipers have been in their new home now for just over a month and they’re making good use of the surroundings we’ve carefully designed for them.

The facility was built just in time for their arrival in 2011 and consists of two indoor enclosures where they can be kept during the cold months, an outdoor enclosure and all of the spaces we need to care for them, including a kitchen for food preparation, storage areas and an all important ‘biosecurity portal’ where we change our footwear and clothes before entering and leaving the rest of the facility.

Although the sandpipers breed in the Arctic, it is actually pretty warm for the few weeks that they are there. They don’t actually seem to tolerate cold weather particularly well so at the moment the birds are being kept in one of their two indoor enclosures and we’re carefully keeping the temperature at a balmy 25˚C.

Each indoor space has a large water pool, a salt water bath, sprigs of artificial Christmas tree to provide cover, a variety of food and water bowls, and lots of heat and UV lamps. The floor of the enclosure that the birds are currently in is covered with round 2mm-gravel (like a beach of very small, smooth pebbles) and in the second room, which we’re preparing for them at the moment, they’ll have river sand. We’re not yet sure which they’d prefer and which would be the better substrate for the condition of their feet (an important consideration for anyone keeping birds), so it’ll be interesting to see how they react to the river sand over the next few weeks.

All 13 birds are making good use of their indoor space, which is great to see as this suggests to us that they’re comfortable and each of the different areas (gravel, water, warmer bits, cooler bits, etc) provides something interesting or useful for them.

Many thanks to everyone who made it to Slimbridge yesterday. It was fantastic to see so many people turn up in person on a cold winter day.

Martin McGill, Roland Digby and Nige Jarrett spoke to a packed room about the ups and downs of the birds’ incredible journey. Look at the Flickr photo gallery.

We saw a short film of footage from the expedition, before Kate Humble drew back the curtain to reveal the live video link up with the birds in their specially-built aviary. All visitors to Slimbridge can view the birds over the CCTV link up in the cinema at 2.30pm each day (except Christmas Day, Boxing Day, 29 and 30 December).

It was also the day to celebrate the spoon-billed sandpipers’ emergence from quarantine. The birds’ story featured on BBC and ITV news bulletins throughout the day.

Please join us and our Vice-President Kate Humble for a very special event on Monday 19 December, which will include the first chance to glimpse the spoon-billed sandpipers in the UK.

Kate will unveil a live CCTV link up with the specially-constructed Slimbridge aviary, which is now the focus of the spoon-billed sandpiper breeding programme.

Readers of this blog will be aware that CCTV has been crucial in keeping a watchful eye on the birds brought to the UK. Now it will give visitors to Slimbridge a chance to see them for themselves.

Kate will also host an audience with Nigel Jarrett, Martin McGill and Roland Digby, talking about the expedition to Russia and the continuing challenges of trying to secure a future for the spoon-billed sandpiper.

Kate and Martin will also be signing copies of their book Watching Waterbirds – a perfect Christmas gift for budding conservationists!

Places for this event are extrememly limited so register early to secure a place. Places are by donation only and the usual admission charges apply.

To book your place and find out more about the event click here

Nicky Hiscock, WWT’s conservation breeding assistant has been caring for the spoon-billed sandpipers since they arrived in the UK.

We’ve posted some more footage from the CCTV cameras that monitor the birds below and you can see Nicky going in with the birds. She’s described for us the daily routine in the quarantine station.

You’ll see in the footage, I’m wearing overalls and rubber shoes. Obviously it’s vital to minimise the risk of any bugs getting to the birds, so changing clothes and handwashing is the first thing you do as you arrive at quarantine.

I get in first thing in the morning. I check the birds via the CCTV (so I’m seeing them as you are on the video here). It’s such a useful tool; it really helps us to monitor them without causing any disturbance.

Because of the size of the rooms in the quarantine station, the birds are in three small groups. When I change their food and check on them, I do each group in sequence, completing all checks on one before moving on to the next.

So, once I’ve got all their food ready, I go in to the first group. You can’t hear it on the video, but I give a little whistle before going in, so they’re not spooked when I open the door.

Once in there, I kneel down so not to intimidate the birds too much. And I always move really slowly and quietly, keeping an eye on where they all are.

I visually check that the birds are all alright. I take temperature and humidity readings – particularly checking the max and min readings overnight. You’ll see me making notes.

I’m also writing down how much food they’ve taken. We want to avoid handling the birds as much as possible, so this is a good alternative to weighing them.

Throwing them a pinch of mealworms helps to calm them down and distract them when I’m in there. It gives them a chance to peck at something as they would in the wild. (They also pick any flies out of the air and take advantage of any spiders that stray into their rooms.)

I take all the old food bowls out, empty and wash them. I try to replace the clean bowls in the same position so not to upset their routine.

As Nige explained last week, the three large terracotta-coloured dishes are filled with water. Two are fresh water, while the other is a salt bath. They are all very shallow and you’ll see me sprinkle some dried shrimps and protein-rich food pellets on top.

The spoon-billed sandpipers are filter-feeders – they sift through shallow coastal waters with those unusual bills – so giving them some of their food this way mimics that natural feeding. It’s something Nige and Roland tried while the birds were in Moscow Zoo and they responded really well to it.

But they don’t take all their food this way. I fill the smaller bowls with the special food pellets (which are rich in protein and contain all the components needed in their diet). Two of the bowls are left dry and I add water to the other two to soak the pellets. This way they get their food in a variety of forms and they seem to take advantage of that, eating from all the bowls.

After that I might stay for a minute or two to assess their feet and check that they’re all behaving normally. It’s vital to scan the flock thoroughly. They are so small that they could go downhill very rapidly if they got a disease.

Once everything’s done, I leave straight away and return to the CCTV monitors to check that they’re settling quickly. They usually have and are feeding happily.

Nige reports:

At this half-way stage of their quarantine period, we’re really pleased with how the birds are doing. They are feeding, drinking, bathing and loafing just as they should be.

When the birds arrived they were understandably a little unsettled. In the first few days whenever one of us went in to change their food, they’d become a little agitated and would run around with their heads up and alarm-calling. That’s actually quite natural behaviour for them because as humans, with our forward facing eyes, we obviously appear to them as potential predators! However, it was in contrast with Moscow Zoo, where they were settled and rather tame.

This is where the CCTV we’d set up really came into its own. As you can see from the video, we can look down on the birds remotely. We’d set CCTV cameras  in each of the three rooms in the quarantine station before the birds arrived and we’ve been able to watch their behaviour, without our own distracting presence. The great news is that they settled beautifully within days of their arrival, going about their “normal business” as you can see.

In the CCTV footage you can see three shallow plastic “terracotta-coloured” feeding dishes. These are filled with water on which sprinkled food can float. The large dish is filled with running water from the tap via the yellow hose. Two other dishes are filled with dry food and the two smallest with soaked food.

The artificial Christmas tree branches break up the 2.4 by 1.8 metres space in which the birds live and give them somewhere to get away from each other. The floor is covered with river sand – an ideal substrate for the birds to walk on. The black tray contains a heat mat covered with more river sand.

The room is heated to twenty degrees centigrade by fan heaters and infra-red spot lamps. The temperature and humidity is recorded by a thermo-hygrometer which you can see propped against the wall.

While the birds are in quarantine, only the dedicated staff are able to see them. Not even the steering group for the project have had access. To give them a really clear view of the birds’ behaviour, I took the other short video you can see below from the birds’ eye-level.

In an upcoming blog, we’ll get the Conservation Breeding Unit’s Nicky Hiscock to describe how she goes about the day-to-day care of the birds.

Baz Hughes, WWT’s Head of Species Conservation writes:

Wow. What a day we had on Friday!

I couldn’t sleep the night before. I woke up at 5.30am thinking how would 13 tiny little Spoon-billed Sandpipers cope with being boxed up for 17 hours and flown from Moscow to Heathrow and then driven to Slimbridge.

The answer?

No-one knew because it had never been done before…

My working day started at 6.05am when I got a text from Nige saying he’d just gone through passport control in Moscow, having left the Spoon-billed Sandpipers an hour ago.

I think … “I wonder how the birds are?”

Then another text at 7.25am saying he was about to board, then another at 7.59am saying he was on board the plane and his feeling that “the spoon-billed sandpipers must be below me”.

After dropping my daughter, Holly, off at school I headed to Slimbridge where I met up with the WWT team who had worked so hard to prepare for the arrival of our precious cargo.

Rebecca Lee, Senior Species Conservation Officer and Nicki Hiscock, Conservation Breeding Assistant. The amount of preparatory work these guys have put in – dealing with logistics and preparing the quarantine station for the birds – cannot be underestimated. They’ve done a fantastic job.

We then met with the team who would be travelling to Heathrow to pick up the birds and are briefed by Becs on our itinerary – put simply, drive to the City of London Corporation’s Animal Reception Centre at Heathrow in two cars, pick up the birds, one crate of birds in each car, on the way back. With the military precision planning of our Conservation Breeding Unit, it was actually more complicated than that, but I’ll spare you the details.

At this point, we all think … “I wonder how the birds are?”

9.05am – we set off from Slimbridge.

In one car there was Pete Cranswick, our Head of Species Recovery, and Michelle O’Brien, our vet.

In the other, I shared a ride with our Head of Media, Sacha Dench, who would be filming the birds’ arrival.

On the Aeroflot flight due to land at 12.15pm. If all went to plan…

10.00am – I’m driving along the M4 east to London. Sacha gets a call to say the plane is now due to land at 11.28am.

10.01am – we go a little faster.

11.00am – we arrive at the Animal Reception Centre in good time.

And meet Animal Health Officer Stuart King, star of the BBC documentary television series “Airport” – basically the guy in charge of checking the birds over when they land, and in his own words “making sure they are what you say they are”. No mistaking spoon-billed sands, so hopefully no problem there!

11.35am – text from Nige saying they’ve landed.

We all think … “I wonder how the birds are?”

11.45am – Stuart sets off to pick the birds up from the Aeroflot flight.

12.15pm – Stuart returns with the birds from the Aeroflot flight.

He toots his horn at me as he drives into the Animal Reception Centre and gives me the thumbs up.

I think … “the birds must be okay”. I hope.

I hope … “the birds must be okay”.

The birds are then offloaded and, through the mesh of a carrying crate (which Stuart said was one of the best carrying crates he had ever seen), I see, for the first time in my life, a spoon-billed sandpiper.

Or, more accurately, I see 13 spoon-billed sandpipers, all alive and well and chirruping away to each other.

A film crew immediately stick a camera in Pete’s face asking him how he feels. He does a fantastic job of describing the emotion of the moment. Glad they didn’t stick it in my face. I would have just burst into tears.

12.30pm – I pick Nige and Roland up from Terminal 4 and return to Animal Reception Centre.

Then there was lots of checking birds and form filling and such stuff. Our thanks to Stuart and his staff at the City of London Corporation and to Liz Schickle, the vet, for fast-tracking the birds through the system.

2.15pm – we get on the road back to Slimbridge.

The birds are mysteriously silent all the way home. Nige says they’re probably asleep and doesn’t seem worried.

I am.

‘Never have I (certainly never has Pete) driven so carefully before – having 4% of the world population of one of the most critically endangered birds in the boot makes your right foot a little lighter!’

4.15pm – we arrive at the Slimbridge quarantine station.

Nige, Roland and the rest of the team go in to make the final checks to the facilities and prepare them for the birds. As well as providing food and water, they also put little artificial Christmas trees into the aviaries – sometimes the birds seek comfort from these (scroll down to see a photo of one of the spoon-billed sand chicks sleeping against one in Moscow).

4.30pm – Pete and I carry the precious crates of birds into the quarantine station and then leave the team to go and fill up the hire cars with petrol. We leave the experts to it – examining the birds and putting them into their new accommodation.

5.15pm – everything is done. We now have three groups of four, four and five spoon-billed sandpipers in the quarantine station at Slimbridge.

We stand in a circle outside the station discussing next steps.

The whole team (those mentioned above plus Dr. Ruth Cromie, our Head of Wildlife Health) is strangely subdued (very, very unusually for this lot!).

Even a day later, I’m not sure why this was.

Because we were all tired? Undoubtedly. Not physically, but mentally exhausted.

Or was it because we, subconsciously, realised what we’d achieved?

I know that, despite the incredible amount of effort we’ve all put into this project, this is only the start, but to say I’m proud of our WWT Conservation Breeding Team, would be the understatement of my life.

They are true “conservation heroes”.

Baz

PS. 10.30pm. I think … “the birds are okay”… And go to sleep.

Since the birds’ stay in Moscow has been prolonged, Nige and Roland have been taking it in turns to oversee their care in Moscow.

Nige returned to Moscow at the weekend and reports that yesterday the birds were checked over by the Moscow Zoo vet. She listened to their breathing with a stethoscope, assessed their body condition by feeling the muscle on their chest and took swabs to check for disease.

The team is doing all it can to monitor the birds’ health and eliminate any risks. The checks showed that all the birds were breathing normally and had gained weight too, which is a sure sign they are fit and well. They are all beginning to moult from their brown juvenile to silvery winter plumage.

The continued good health of the birds is a testament to the excellent staff and facilities at Moscow Zoo, where the birds are quarantined. We’re very grateful that the care and support that they offer is as good and has helped us raise thirteen birds. Whilst three birds have died during the long period since their arrival in August, this is more than three times the number that we’d expect to survive this long in the wild.

The zoo vet listening to a bird's breathing pattern with a stethoscope (c) Nigel Jarrett

Commenting on spoon-billed sandpiper story in The Guardian and picked up in the Readers’ Room, reader mjback makes the comment:

Am I being cynical or do I detect a faint whiff of speciesism here? Would the same effort have been made if the bird didn’t have an interestingly shaped beak? Birds of paradise have no more intrinsic value than sparrows, but we’re always going to get more upset about their demise because we find them prettier.

I doubt anyone involved with saving the spoon-billed sandpiper could dispute mjback’s assertion that all species have the same intrinsic value. However, millions of birds, not just spoon-billed sandpipers, are threatened by the loss of intertidal habitat along the East-Asian Australasian Flyway. We have to do what we can to save this Critically Endangered species from extinction. If this one species’ (extrinsic) good looks brings this massive problem to people’s attention, we might save far more than just the spoon-billed sandpiper.

Nigel Clark, wader expert at the BTO, explains:

We’re very sorry to say that, having expected the birds back in the UK on 13 October, they have been delayed in Moscow. Our apologies to anyone reading The Guardian yesterday, who will have read that they did arrive. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get the message to the editorial team in time.

The reasons for the delay are nothing to do with the spoon-billed sandpipers thankfully. Temporary restrictions have been imposed on moving all birds from Moscow and we are now looking at bringing them to the UK in early November. Nigel Jarrett, who had flown out to accompany the birds over here, has had to return to the UK. Roland Digby has travelled back out to Moscow to resume care of the birds.

Despite the implications for us and the extra time before they reach the expert team at the Conservation Breeding Unit at Slimbridge, there is good reason for strict quarantine – animals are isolated so that they are not exposed to any new disease and, if they were carrying any controlled diseases, they would develop symptoms and become obvious within this period. With many naturally occurring diseases and conditions, losses are expected at this stage, but the good news is that the purpose-built facilities that will be the birds’ home at Slimbridge are now completed and will enable our expert aviculture team to give the birds the best care possible when they do, eventually, arrive.