Migratory shorebirds depend on tidal flat stopover sites to refuel during epic journeys of thousands of kilometers. Loss of these habitats creates welfare emergencies across entire flyways.
Migratory shorebirds face welfare harms that are distributed across entire flyway systems — a welfare failure at one stopover site reverberates as starvation, reproductive failure, and death across thousands of kilometers. Birds arriving at depleted tidal flats cannot refuel adequately and may fail to complete migration, dying of exhaustion or arriving at breeding grounds in condition too poor for reproduction. The scale of tidal flat loss in East Asia has created an ongoing welfare crisis for millions of individual birds undertaking some of the most demanding journeys in the animal kingdom.