For his 60th birthday on June 16, Joel Sartore celebrated with another milestone: Photographing the 13,000th species in National Geographic’s Photo Ark.

He captured photos and video of the critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper, a European and Asian shorebird with a distinctive spoon-shaped beak, at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre in England.

The birds’ caretakers spent more than a month training the animals to walk on a blackboard by covering it with sand (to imitate its natural habitat) and feeding them baby crickets as treats.

Sartore was then able to photograph the birds against the Photo Ark’s signature black-and-white backgrounds, which puts all species on the same footing, so to speak.

“Most of the animals that we share