English shorebird news


This is a bar-tailed godwit video.

From Wildlife Extra:

New Ramsar site for UK

More than 20,000 waterbirds and waders including bar-tailed godwits and knots can enjoy greater protection with the designation of the UK’s Mersey Narrows and North Wirral Foreshore as a Ramsar Site.

It is situated on the Irish Sea coast of north-west England at the mouths of the Mersey and Dee estuaries and comprises of large areas of saltmarsh and extensive intertidal sand and mud flats, with limited areas of brackish marsh, rocky shoreline and boulder clay cliffs, along a rural and industrial stretch of coast.

The wetland provides ecosystem services including shoreline stabilisation and dissipation of erosive forces, sediment trapping and water supply.

The potential threats to its ecological character derive from increasing recreational activities and social and economic pressures to return the foreshore back to sandy beaches, and sedimentation of the foreshore which reduces the available low-tide feeding habitat and causes vegetation succession.

Sites are recognised by the Ramsar Convention Secretariat as a Wetland of International Importance and that the country’s commitment to maintain the ecological character of them.

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