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

We have just heard that Roland (WWT) has arrived safely in Meinypil’gyno, Chukotka, along with colleagues from BirdsRussia, to begin the 2016 expedition to monitor and ‘headstart’ Spoon-billed Sandpipers at this important breeding site. It’s a long journey from Slimbridge, via London

A fourth bird from our 2015 cohort of headstarted birds was resighted n 16 November, this time in the Gulf of Thailand. Although the image is a little grainy the bird was identified as: P7 (pink left), a bird that was last seen in Chukotka on 3 August, aged 27 days old. The observer M

The physical component of headstarting for me finished on 2 August, but the reality is that work never stops with any aspect of this project. There is always planning and preparation for the next year and, most excitingly for me, there are the reports from further along the flyway. On