Saving Spoonie

Known to its fans as ‘Spoonie’, the spoon-billed sandpiper is native to the mudflats. The documentary portrays an international community of ornithologists working to save it. A breeding programme is underway in the UK, and in China, Spoonie is the poster boy for a burgeoning environmental movement. But the population is dwindling, and the task force’s work is complicated by the bird’s migration route, which leads from Russia through North Korea and China to Myanmar, taking it through the crisis-hit regions of the past decade.