Spoon-billed Sandpipers return home to breed

Five Spoon-billed Sandpipers that were fostered by Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWT) conservationists have returned to Siberia to breed for the first time and been captured on video.

The momentous event can be seen on video in a film the WWT have called Spoonievision, which has the first footage of the birds and behind-the-scenes interviews.

The five birds were taken into captivity as eggs a year ago and raised by the WWT's expert bird keepers until they fledged. They were then returned to Siberia, migrated to South-East Asia, and then three went on to mate and produce their own eggs, which will help to stabilise the population of this Critically Endangered tiny wader — there are fewer than 100 pairs left in the wild, a quantity which together would weigh less than a single Mute Swan.

Viewers of Spoonievision will see footage from the Russian breeding grounds and meet the experts who masterminded the plan to save Spoon-billed Sandpiper, as well as film of Kate Humble at the breeding project which is being run in parallel at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.

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."