It’s that time of year again! The monitoring and headstarting team have arrived at the breeding grounds in Meinypil’gyno, Russia to await the return of the spoon-billed sandpipers, and at WWT Slimbridge, we’ve moved birds to breeding aviaries and the singing and nest scrap

Yesterday, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper headstarting programme successfully released 30 fledglings. That’s the most in a single year and means we’ve now released over 100 Spoon-billed Sandpipers (111 to be exact)! Roland has let us know that the release went to plan with all

There are now 30 chicks thriving under the team’s care and living in the release aviary. The chicks have one more week to get accustomed to their surroundings with release planned for early next week! In the last blog, we reported that 22 chicks had successfully hatched and ten

The team reached their target of collecting 36 eggs and within days, 22 of those eggs hatched! The chicks are doing well and should all be ready for a single release in a few weeks time.  Last time we heard from Roland he reported that the incubator was almost full with 32 eggs but th

A quick update to let you know that the team in Russia now has 32 eggs, not all the collection trips have gone smoothly with the quad bike transporting the last clutch breaking down at the western oil drills, and another headstarted bird, White T8, has been spotted. Roland has let us

Update just in from Roland: the western area of Meinypil’gyno is proving good for pairs this year, a bird from the 2014 headstarting cohort has been spotted and 20 eggs are in the incubator. On the 15 June, a small team including Nikolai, Egor and Roman and Sveta’s family, heade

Egg collection at Meinypil’gyno is underway and another headstarted bird has been spotted – White E7, headstarted just last year. The first eggs required for the headstarting programme were collected a couple of days ago, on 13 June. Three clutches have been collected so far tot

As reported in the last blog, conditions this year are unusually warm and dry. While these conditions have been good for breeding habitat in some low-level areas, conditions are too dry in many of the key areas used by breeding Spoon-billed Sandpipers in recent years at Meinypil’gyno.

Our latest update comes from Evgeny Syroechkovskiy, Director of BirdsRussia and Head of the Arctic Biodiversity Conservation Centre of the All-Russian Institute for Nature Conservation. Evgeny reports that although spring came early on the breeding grounds this year with relatively wa

As mentioned in the last blog, we were really hoping to see the Spoon-billed Sandpiper marked White MA (white leg-flag engraved with the letters MA) this year. He was headstarted by Roland and the team in 2013, has been seen and photographed in the flyway, and returned to successfully