08/31/2019
New York Times
One of the few things known about the
Nordmann’s greenshank is that it is one of the most endangered shorebirds on
earth. No one had studied the bird in depth since 1976, and its nesting habitat
remained a mystery.
But this summer, an American graduate
student and Russian ornithologists spotted a pair of Nordmann’s greenshanks in
a larch forest near a coastal bog in far eastern Russia. They shot video of one
in a nest, measured and photographed four eggs and tagged seven adult birds, a
few which have been spotted again as they migrated south across Asia.
“The moment of discovery — it was pure
joy,” said Philipp Maleko, a graduate student at the University of Florida, who
tracked the birds for nearly two months this summer, wading through the bog and
forest to spot the nest. In addition to fighting off hordes of mosquitoes, the
research team traveled with an armed guard to ward off bears and wolves.
Their research marked the first
in-depth investigation in decades of the Nordmann’s greenshank (Tringa
guttifer), a pigeon-size bird named for a 19th-century Finnish biologist
and parasitologist.
The population of Nordmann’s
greenshanks has been crashing in recent decades, as a result of hunting and
wetland reclamation in coastal Asia. No more than 2,000 of the birds, also
called the spotted greenshank, are believed to be left in the wild, said
Jonathan Slaght, the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife
Conservation Society, which helped lead the research effort.
The most endangered migratory shorebird
is the spoon-billed sandpiper, Slaght said. In Southeast Asia, where both
species spend their winters, hunters often kill the birds to sell for food.
Local conservation groups have been paying a few hundred dollars each to the
hunters so they can afford fishing nets and stop killing shorebirds. “They don’t
want to be hunting birds, it’s just all they can do,” Slaght said.
