Port Hedland Saltworks Important Bird Area
The Port Hedland Saltworks Important Bird Area is a 103 square kilometre area of land near Port Hedland in north-west Western Australia. It now hosts a salt processing facility owned by Dampier Salt Ltd (part of the Rio Tinto Group).
The IBA includes evaporation ponds, the seawater intake area, and nearby intertidal mudflats, with levee banks and some mangroves. At low tide, waterbirds feed on the mudflats and along creeks; at high tide they move into the saltworks to feed or rest.
Dampier Salt bought the site in 2001. The saltworks cover about 91 square kilometres, with nine evaporation ponds spanning 78 square kilometres, and they can produce about 3.2 million tonnes of salt each year.
BirdLife International has designated this area as an IBA because it regularly supports more than 1% of the world populations of red-necked stints and sharp-tailed sandpipers, and it is home to the range-restricted dusky gerygone.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many more waterbirds used the area, with counts reaching up to around 66,800 birds. Since the saltworks expanded in the 1990s, numbers have fallen to about 5,000–10,000.
Some species have declined since the 1980s, including broad-billed sandpipers, Asian dowitchers, curlew sandpipers, red-necked avocets, banded stilts, Oriental plovers, Oriental pratincoles, and white-winged black terns. Other birds in the area include Australian bustards, bush stone-curlews, western bowerbirds, painted finches, and canary white-eyes.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:14 (CET).