What Species Do We Save? by Mia Jardine

Across the globe, over a million species are at risk. Without the budget or resources to save them all, one must beg the question “which ones do we save?” I read a BBC article detailing a project in the U.K. which proved to be a success when two spoon-billed sandpipers were born, members of possibly the most endangered bird species on the planet. Getting to this point took the people running the project 10 years to achieve. The utmost precaution is taken to ensure the chicks don’t fall dead, like wearing hairnets around the enclosure so no hair falls in and entraps them. Both the birds have “shovel-shaped bills”, an identifying characteristic of their species. This is the first time in a decade that these sandpipers have been bred in captivity. The eggs that came before them were imported from Russian nesting grounds when only a few hundred of them existed. This was the first step the “Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust” (WWT) took to protect this species. So why did we save those species and what ones do we continue to save? This past year the number one million was proposed by the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, meaning one million species are “under threat” and we are at fault. The spoon-billed pipers were one of the lucky few. The project to save these birds was enacted in 2011, and the animals took their time to breed because according to Professor Debbie Pain, “doing something that's never been done before can take a long time.” Pain is a conservation scientist who worked on this project and claims that the dispatching of a team to Russia was a “crisis conservation”. The scientists who worked on this task helped the chicks in the wild as well. They were among the 4,000 species on the “Critically Endangered” list. In 1970, there were 3,000 breeding pairs. Then only 1,000 breeding pairs in 2000. Finally, there were only less than 250 breeding pairs in 2014. Of course, this was all due to human behavior. Many were being accidentally caught by hunters and they were also losing their habitat due to development. This event represents the dire state our planet and many of its inhabitants are in. More and more species are becoming endangered due to human error. This is really impactful to our biodiversity. Loss of biodiversity is dangerous, it collapses ecosystems and hurts the food industry. Usually when species are announced endangered or at risk today it is because of human behavior. Pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, and hunting is a direct correlation to loss of biodiversity and therefore extinction/endangerment. In the article, we see the struggle to preserve one small bird species that was nearly gone due to habitat destruction and hunting. This is the case for many species today and many species to come. So the question is, how do we stop this?

spoon-billed sandpiper chicks

Article Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50788571