The red-crowned crane, spoon-billed sandpiper, Nordmann's greenshank and Saunders's gull are endangered migratory birds that will now be better protected in China as their key habitats were listed as natural UNESCO World Heritage sites last Friday.
At the ongoing 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, the Phase I project of the Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf of China were added to the World Heritage list as a natural site.
It is the country's 54th World Heritage site, 14th natural World Heritage site and the country's first and the world's second intertidal mud flat heritage site, according to a news release from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
"It fills in the country's gap of intertidal wetland heritage sites," the release said.
The Phase I site, covering most of the Yancheng Wetland Rare Birds National Nature Reserve, the Dafeng Milu National Nature Reserve and intertidal mud flats facing the Yellow Sea in the cities of Yancheng and Dongtai in Jiangsu province, is right in the middle of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Every year, thousands of migratory birds, especially shorebirds, make stopovers, breed or winter on the intertidal wetlands in the area.
Of them, more than 90 percent of the world's spoon-billed sandpipers, a critically endangered sparrow-sized shorebird, make stopovers during their migration route between their breeding grounds in Siberia and their wintering grounds in the south. About 80 percent of the world's wild red-crowned cranes will winter in the Phase I area, according to the administration.
(Source:ourjiangsu.com)
