World Heritage Site status for English coastal stretch as part of East Atlantic Flyway for migrating shorebirds?

                                 

Waders, such as these knot, at Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire 

LOCATIONS on the East Coast of England are along a bird migration route being proposed as a World Heritage Site.

The East Atlantic Flyway is one of the candidates submitted to Unesco.

The Government says it supports the nomination "in recognition of its vital importance to bird populations and wildlife".

The flyway stretches from North East Canada, where many wetland birds (such as ducks, geese, swans and waders) breed, all the way to warmer climes in South Africa where some spend winter.

En route, many of these birds (such as dunlin, knot and sanderling) take an extended feeding and resting break, on sandflats and mudflats in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and the Thames Estuary.

There are already bird sanctuaries - for instance, in  China and Senegal - on the existing Unesco list, but, if approved, this flyway would be the first bird migration route to be recognised.

                                          

How The Daily Telegraph reported the announcement in its edition of April 10

The Wryneck says: On the face of it, the Government’s support for designation of the East Atlantic Flyway as a World Heritage Site seems excellent. But how does it square this with its strategy of encouraging hundreds more offshore wind turbines to be installed along much of the same route? Migrating birds and other wild creatures have not evolved to cope with turbines. They are already being imperilled by these giant ‘scarecrows in the sea’. Over the years the ‘flyway’ risks steadily becoming not a heritage wonder but a corridor emptied of much of its wildlife.