Protected for the Birds, From a Fairbanks Dairy Farm to a Flyway in South Australia

Alaska bought the former Creamer dairy farm outside Fairbanks in 1969 because its owner had spent years feeding waste grain to migrating birds. Today about 2,200 acres of wetland, field and forest are kept for the more than one hundred bird species that pass through, with a visitor center run by the Friends of Creamer's Field.

Established on April 14, 1971 on the Senegal River floodplain, Djoudj shelters close to three million birds of roughly 395 species in the migratory season. Ramsar recognition followed in 1977 and World Heritage status in 1981.

This Victorian reserve began in the 1960s with one sheep farmer, Gordon Clarke, who cleared gorse and replanted native vegetation. He donated the first 31 hectares to Bird Observation and Conservation Australia in 1975, and the sanctuary now covers 535 hectares under conservation covenants.

Colombia designated this Guajira Peninsula sanctuary in 1977. About 7,682 hectares of estuary, marsh and dry scrub protect American flamingos and their nests along with roseate spoonbills and great egrets.

Set aside in 1986, this 24 hectare patch of mangrove is all that remains of the forest that once lined the coast at Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. It was designated a Ramsar wetland on October 22, 2016.

Founded in 1988 and opened to visitors in 1993, this sanctuary at the edge of the Sua Pan in Botswana was created with the help of villagers who moved their cattle away. It is one of the largest breeding sites for lesser and greater flamingos in the world.

First protected in January 1999 and redesignated a Protected Landscape in 2016, this 126.5 square kilometre area in northwestern Cambodia was set up chiefly to safeguard the eastern sarus crane.

An uninhabited island northwest of Alderney, Burhou has no settlement because of thin soil and no reliable fresh water. Landing is banned from March 15 to August 1 to protect nesting puffins and storm petrels, and the island was part of a Ramsar designation in 2005.

This wetland near Misawa in northern Japan was given national protection as a bird sanctuary on November 1, 2005 across 737 hectares, with a 222 hectare core as a Special Protected Area. It records 161 bird species and nesting Japanese marsh warblers.

Prek Toal lies in the northwest corner of the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, inside the Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve. It became a Ramsar site on October 2, 2015, and is known for the rare waterbirds that concentrate there as the dry season shrinks the lake.

Proclaimed on October 27, 2016, this park runs about 60 kilometres along the coast of Gulf St Vincent in South Australia. Its wetlands form the southern end of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway for migratory shorebirds.