Black-faced Spoonbill in Hong Kong on New Year’s Day

These photographs were taken on 1 January by AJP in Hong Kong. Catch the tide right in winter at Tsim Bei Tsui overlooking Deep Bay and the entrance of the Shum Chun (Shenzhen) River and there are masses of waders and ducks to be seen.

One ‘special’ bird in Deep Bay in winter is the Black-faced Spoonbill (Platalea minor) since it was not that long ago it was in IUCN’s ‘Critically Endangered’ category. However, there appears to have been a genuine increase in the world population to over 2,000 adults in 2017 and over 4000 in 2020; the classification has been downgraded to ‘Endangered’ with further change in the offing.

The Black-faced Spoonbill breeds on islets off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula as well as north-east China. Birds have also been found nesting in Russia. In the winter it spreads to well-known sites including Deep Bay, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. We have seen this species in winter in Kyushu, Japan, as well as in Hong Kong.

Black-faced Spoonbill, Hong Kong 1 January 2022 (AJP)

A view across Deep Bay with Shenzhen in the background

Avocets and other waders take advantage of the rising tide

 

When we lived in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the Black-faced Spoonbill (then called the Lesser Spoonbill) was considered an ‘occasional visitor’. The 1966 checklist continued: Probably regular in winter in the deep Bay marshes, especially near the mouth of the Sum Chun River, where up to eight birds have been seen on about twenty occasions since 1956’. Numbers increased with over 30 individuals being seen each year by the mid-1980s. At present the numbers in Deep Bay are in hundreds each year, a far cry from the 1960s. The are often joined by Eurasian Spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia), a bird not identified in Hong Kong until 1975. However, it is likely that it went unrecorded or misidentified before that date. Birdwatchers have much greater access to information on identification than they did in the middle decades of the 20th century as well as to the sites where they can be found. The number of birdwatchers has also increased dramatically. But while the numbers of spoonbills wintering in the Pearl River delta and the number of birdwatchers have increased, ‘development’ in Hong Kong itself and especially over the border in the ‘mainland’ (the city you can see in the photograph, Shenzhen, with over 17 million inhabitants, was the small border town of Shum Chun in the 1960s, habitat loss and industrial pollution continue to be a concern. The inner Deep Bay area in Hong Kong is listed as a Ramsar site.

Yellow-billed Grosbeaks (Eophona migratoria), other winter visitors to Hong Kong, were also at Tsim Bei Tsui