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Three black-tailed godwits, or Limosa limosa, wearing bird banding were spotted at Futian Mangrove Nature Reserve during a waterbird survey Tuesday, Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.

According to the bird banding, the three birds are from Hong Kong and they have all come to Shenzhen during winter in previous years. Bird banding is one of the oldest and most important techniques used for studying and identifying individual birds. Valuable information, including area, organization, address and bird type, can be learnt from bird banding.

A black-tailed godwit wearing a bird banding stands in the center of a group of birds. Shenzhen Evening News

Tian Suixing with Shenzhen Bird Watching Society said that in the past 10 years, about 500 to 700 black-tailed godwits have stayed through the winter in Shenzhen Bay.

He also detected five black-tailed godwits Sunday, three of them are the birds found during the waterbird survey Tuesday.

Tian believed that the fact suggests that the ecological environment restoration in Shenzhen Bay has achieved initial results.

Shenzhen Bay spans Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and is an important transfer station of the migratory route, the East Asian — Australasian Flyway.

Nearly 100,000 migratory birds each year spend winter in Shenzhen Bay or make a stop here.

The black-tailed godwit is a medium-sized wading bird measuring up to 44 centimeters long. They have a long mouth, feet and neck. Its white tail has wide black end spots.

It mainly feeds on insects, crustaceans and mollusks, breeds in northern Eurasia and lives mainly in South Africa, India and Australia.

The black-tailed godwit has been listed as “nearly threatened” in the red list of threatened species of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) since 2012.