Latest news on the captive population

Yesterday I visited the chicks to help colour ring them so we can follow the progress of each bird as an individual. I was staggered at their development- it was only a week since I saw them for the first time when the last brood was just hatching. Now they are all running around call

Another apology for the lack of blog posts. Things are still a bit busy here! Nige and Nicky are fine and the 17 chicks are thriving, although one has a bit of a leg problem which is worrying us, but we hope it will pull through. It may have fallen over and injured itself (these birds

For the past nine days, since the eggs arrived at Slimbridge, Nige and Nicky have worked non-stop. And I mean quite literally non-stop – 24 hours a day – grabbing two hours of sleep here and there in between checking the eggs and chicks. Their only breaks to see the outside world are

…here’s seven minutes of otherwise unedited footage of the final leg of the eggs’ journey, their arrival at WWT Slimbridge, Nige and Nicky checking the eggs, the eggs hatching…and the first SBS chicks to hatch in the UK!  

Once again, apologies for the intermittent and brief posts this week. For Nige and Nicky it has been full-on, 24 hours a day, looking after the rapidly growing chicks and checking the as-yet-unhatched eggs. So…what has been happening? Well, after the eggs arrived at Slimbridge l

This year I was gutted at not being part of the WWT team collecting the eggs as they had inconveniently arrived on a day I had “important meetings” so it was Rebecca Lee (Senior Species Conservation Officer), Sacha Dench (Head of Media) and Paul Marshall (our Web Manager) who got the

Many of you will have been anxious to hear some news today so our apologies for not posting sooner but things have been rather hectic! This is just a brief update to say that Nige and 20 Spoon-billed Sandpiper eggs arrived at Heathrow in the early hours of this morning. By mid-morning

We have learnt some very promising news regarding the sexes of our twelve strong flock of spoon-billed sandpipers. We were recently informed of the sexes of almost all of the birds which includes at least four females – hooray! This gives us a ratio of four females to seven males with

Our flock of spoon-billed sandpipers are showing clear signs of maturing. All the birds have started to moult from juvenile into their first winter plumage, which is a polished silvery white like a suit of armour. During a recent evening feed all the birds were being particularly nois