20 June 2011 I was woken by Nige at 0600 he had still not gone to bed keeping an eye on the temperatures of the eggs. My wife had tried to Skype call, it was intermittent and we lost connection several times. I was delighted with being able to hear the voices of my family. I had a cof

19 June 2011 Late afternoon Nige dropped Simon at the foot of the hills so he could search he returned for me as I was going to lead him to a Dunlin nest later. Pavel, Egor and Nikolay were all searching the moraine hill territories for SBS nests. Jochen went with Gerrit to the east e

19 June 2011 More pictures have been added to the gallery page. The gallery contains images of bird sightings, people we work and live with and members of the team.

19 June 2011 A collection of images that we have collected of the spoon-billed sandpiper. All images by Martin McGill/Jochen Dierschke   [slideshow]

18 June 2011 Nige and I spent the day searching for nests with Jochen, each day we partner, go it alone or form a group to search, we covered several over hills, marsh and gravel,  and employed a treble transect technique, forming a line with the three of us spaced out and walking the

17 June 2011 Today as usual we all had a different area to cover, we are moved around so we all get a change. I was paired with Simon to take the quad into the hills to check over a few areas. It was quite a challenge getting the machine through marshes in particular but the route is

16 June 2011 I felt sickened  today, to see one of the birds I had been watching dead, to know it had laid eggs in the same small gulley where I watched a pair together in the sun days before and saw the male on guard was rather sad. Natural predators are a part of what happens, it ha

15 June 2011 Martin reports: Need to catch up a bit, two full on days! On a downer over the spoon-billed sandpiper still. We need some good news. Had some seriously close bear encounters and saw a wolf today. The bears are scary. I’m not sure what they would do, but we kept our distan

14 June 2011 Martin took a break from blogging today and handed the reigns over to Nigel Jarrett for the day. We got an upsetting message from Nigel yesterday. It comes on top of all the stresses of trying to build a safe rearing facility for one of the world’s rarest birds in a very

13 June 2011 Martin reports: It was a public holiday for locals; another gorgeous, sunny, but still cool day for us. Simon went off with Pavel and Egor catching red knot for ringing and trying to locate nests. They spent all day out there using a mist net to catch them. Poles are carr