Moves to bring North Korea into the international fold might have dominated the headlines in recent weeks with President Donald Trump’s intervention but a feathered ambassador travelling from both Australia and New Zealand got there first.
The bar-tailed godwit, whose epic round-trip migratory journey of at least 24,000 kilometres requires a stopover in North Korea, has for the past 10 years created a conduit for communication between the “hermit state” and a western nation, New Zealand.
In turn, the visits of a group of birdwatchers to monitor the godwits during their refuelling stop in North Korea led to the government there allowing a television film crew from a major New Zealand network to visit the country last month.
The bar-tailed godwit is a large shorebird which in recent years has been found to make remarkable non-stop flights to and from its breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska to its non-breeding range in New Zealand and Australia, where Tasmania is at the far south of its range. In 2007 New Zealand researchers who attached a tiny transmitter to a female godwit at a nature reserve near Auckland were amazed to discover the bird flew 9656 kilometres non-stop on the first leg of its 17,000 northward journey.
The migratory route takes the godwit – a long-beaked and long-legged bird about the size of a magpie – along what is known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. It is along this route that the species, and other migratory waders, have run into trouble in recent years because the wetlands of the Yellow Sea bordering China and North and South Korea – which the birds use as refuelling stops – are being drained for industrial, housing and agriculture development.
The birds have been denied food and as a result have suffered sometimes catastrophic declines in their number. Several, including the bar-tailed godwit, are classed as critically endangered in Australia. One of the most threatened, the eastern curlew, has declined by 90 per cent in Tasmania alone.
Although it was been possible to monitor waders in South Korea and China, researchers were denied access to North Korea until 2006 when a diplomatic initiative by the New Zealand Government to develop a friendship agreement with Pyongyang allowed a group of dedicated godwit watchers to gain access to the country.
What they found startled them: the wetlands of the north largely remained in a pristine state and had not been developed to the same degree as in other areas of the Yellow Sea under the administration of China and South Korea.
The researchers found thousands of birds spending a few weeks in the country before making their onward journey north. The spectacle also surprised the North Korea authorities who were unaware of their “natural cargo”, as one of the New Zealand group, Adrian Riegan put it.
“The Koreans feel they are really learning about the godwit,” said Riegan. “They desperately want to be involved in international conservation for these birds, and want to know what part they can play.”