Birds Korea: Just Keep Educating
Working for Birds Korea provides multiple opportunities to travel around the country, to survey remarkable species-rich landscapes and to work with wonderful people. Professor Choi Jae-Cheon is one such person. As the top ecologist in the nation and president of the National Ecological Institute in Seocheon, Dr. Choi has a deep love and knowledge of the nation and the natural world.
Dr. Choi agreed to be interviewed for a film that Birds Korea is currently making. The film aims to tell the story of the diminutive Spoon-billed Sandpiper. This is a bird species, a little bigger than a sparrow, with a uniquely flattened spoon-shaped bill that enables it to feed on shrimp and other small animals found in the mud. It nests up in Arctic Russia, migrates through the Yellow Sea of Korea and China, and usually spends winters in the Bay of Bengal. Fully dependent upon healthy estuaries and tidal-flats for its survival, this tiny bird’s total population has crashed in recent decades, so that now probably only 300 remain worldwide. For many of us, this is a deeply sobering thought. Throughout this vast region, once huge estuaries and tidal-flats used to support enormous fisheries and an abundance of other life, including human fishing communities and tens of thousands of Spoon-billed Sandpipers. Now, these same tidal-flats are so degraded and over-exploited that only a few hundred of these tiny birds can survive.
The future of this species and of many others should be ensured through high-level intergovernmental agreements. Nonetheless, this and many other species continue to decline. Dr. Choi spoke with a gentle intensity about the Spoon-billed Sandpiper’s plight. “When the Spoon-billed Sandpiper disappears,” he said, “it is not just the extinction of that particular bird species. It is an indication of the degradation of a very valuable ecosystem. And that will come back and hit us. We should be very careful when we plan to destroy any part of nature.”
In response, our next question was one that many of us ask ourselves each day. For the benefit of people as well as of biodiversity in general, what can any of us do to stop the extinction of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, and to help conserve idal-flats and natural habitats? A warm smile grew across Dr. Choi’s face. He simply said: “Education. If we just keep educating, then people will one day understand the importance of tidal-flats. Once they understand, then we don’t have to do anything. They will do it. That is the beauty of the Korean personality.”