A team of experts has embarked on an emergency bid to save one of the world’s rarest birds from extinction by establishing a captive breeding scheme.

The conservation team led by staff at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Birds Russia has headed to the Russian Far East to locate and collect eggs from the spoon-billed sandpiper, whose numbers had fallen to just 120-200 pairs by 2009.

It is hoped the eggs will hatch in an incubation facility on the tundra in Russia, before the chicks are brought to a breeding unit at WWT’s headquarters in Slimbridge, Glou-cestershire, where staff will rear them to establish a captive population.

The captive breeding birds will be the source for reintroductions into the wild, once the threats to the spoon-billed sandpipers have been tackled, and provide a safety net in case the bird becomes extinct in the wild.

The migratory bird’s numbers are thought to be declining by around a quarter each year due to very low survival rates of juvenile spoon-billed sandpipers and could go extinct within a decade without action to help it.

The wading birds are being hit by hunting in their wintering grounds in Burma, and by damage to habitats on their migration “flyway” along the coasts of Korea, China and Japan, the conservationists have warned.

While efforts are being made to tackle the threats to the species in the wild, it will not be possible to turn round the sandpiper’s fortunes quickly enough to save it from extinction without securing a captive breeding population. a WWT spokesman said.

WWT director of conservation Debbie Pain said the species was “falling off a cliff” and the captive breeding bid, which also involves the RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology, BirdLife International, ArcCona, the Spoon-Billed Sandpiper Task Force and Moscow Zoo, was “essential”.