Life on the East Asian Flyway - Part Three: Yellow Sea North

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Can China’s new generation of birdwatchers and North Korea’s weak economy save migratory birds from extinction?

Habitat loss for shorebirds in the Yellow Sea is rapid as the mudflats on which they depend are converted to farmland, factories, ports, oil refineries and golf courses. But all is not lost on the East Asian Australasian Flyway.

Ann Jones travels around the northern end of the Yellow Sea, talking to the world’s leading shorebird researchers and Chinese nature lovers about their concerns for the Flyway’s future. They discuss their feelings for the long distance migration champions of the natural world, like the Eastern curlew and bar-tailed godwit. Ann also meets the New Zealand conservationists who have just emerged from North Korea with good news about the birds.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National. Additional recordings were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker and Ann Jones.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National.

Additional recordings were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Curlew sandpipers coming to one of the few feeding sites left for them along the coast of Bohai Bay in northern China. Credit: Ann Jones

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:25.1	It's... broadcasts. lights above me that don't work, a power line behind me that I don't know where that's going, that probably doesn't work either.
0:26.8	An oil installation to my left and 60 boats oil tankers on view but also I'm looking at tens of thousands of
0:38.9	Margaret's shorebirds. She don't need to be a bird watching to appreciate that.
0:46.5	The BBC's tour of one of the planet's great natural spectacles continues.
0:51.6	Bartel Godwits, Eurasian curleus, redneck stints, Broadbill Sandpipers, Dunlins, Curlewes Sandpipers, Rednots, Asian Dowagers.
1:00.0	Curly Sandpiper from Victoria, Southeast Australia, Thailand Red Knot,
1:04.3	Chong-Dongtowns near Shanghai, and three Red Knots from Broom.
1:08.8	So three Red-Nots that I probably had in my hand and actually put the bands on, which is always
1:15.6	rather nice to see them here, six and a half thousand kilometers away.
1:22.4	Every year 8 million birds fly from one end of the globe to the other.
1:30.0	But for some, this migration will be their last.
1:36.0	I'm Anne Jones, this is Discovery on the BBC World Service,
1:40.0	and you're listening to a special co-production with Radio National from Australia.
1:45.0	We're at the halfway point along one of the longest migratory routes in the world,
1:50.0	the East Asian-Australian flyway.
1:52.0	We've started in Australia finding out that shorebirds need large swades of intertidal mud flat to feed on,
2:00.0	and they'll feed and feed until they're so fat that they look like they're wearing
2:06.0	feathered sumo suits. They'll be half their normal size again and they'll use that fat
2:11.9	to migrate from one end of the globe to the other in two hops.
	...

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