Stemming the tide

Description

The bar-tailed godwit journeys more than 10,200 MILES from its winter home in New Zealand to its breeding grounds in Alaska—stopping only once in East Asia’s YELLOW SEA to refuel. All the more reason to save vital habitat for it and other long-distance shorebird migrants.

The mudflats “have been a critical staging site for thousands of years but are now disappearing fast,” says Theunis Piersma, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Groningen and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.