I had wanted to see the Spoon-billed Sandpiper for many years. I had been disappointed when I had visited Hong Kong’s Mai Po reserve a few years ago not to see them. As in many other of their former wintering and stop over migration places now, numbers of this species are critically low and development of their mud habitat is such that they are one of the most threatened birds on the planet. There may be less than 300 hundred left, and I so wanted to see one before they became extinct.