Voyage of the Doomed: Bar-tailed Godwits roost at a key refueling spot on their northward migration. That plume is the fill that will turn this site in Yalujiang, Liaoning Province, China, into dry land. (Photo: David Melville)
Every spring, tens of thousands of plump, russet-breasted shorebirds drop down onto the wetlands of China’s Bohai Bay, ravenous after traveling 3,000 miles from Australia. This Yellow Sea stopover point is crucial for the birds, called red knots, to rest and refuel for the second leg of their journey, which will take them another 2,000 miles up to the Arctic tundra.
Unfortunately for the red knots, the intertidal flats of Bohai Bay are rapidly disappearing, cut off from the ocean by new sea walls and filled in with silt and rock, to create buildable land for development. In a society now relentlessly focused on short-term profit that seems like a wonderful bargain, and the collateral loss of vast areas of shorebird habitat merely an incidental detail. As a result, China’s seawall mileage has more than tripled over the past two decades, and now covers 60 percent of the mainland coastline. This “new Great Wall” is already longer than the celebrated Great Wall of China, according to an article published Thursday in Science, and it’s just getting bigger every year—with catastrophic consequences for wildlife and people.
“Reclamation” is what they still call it, a term dating from an era when pretty much everyone thought wetlands were useless, stinking, swampy places of no possible benefit to people. Or Read the rest of this entry »
strange behaviors 