Birds are said to act as the “canary in the coalmine’’ to warn of threats to the environment from hunting, land clearance and pollution. The same notion is now being applied to the impact of war.
With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the worst fears of bird-lovers have been realised. Along with the colossal toll in human life which we see daily on our television screens, the country’s birdlife is also suffering.
When Russia invaded four years ago I wrote a column highlighting the plight of Ukraine’s national bird, the white stork, which as guns blazed was just arriving from its wintering grounds in Africa.
Now Ukrainian ornithologists have confirmed that shell-shocked storks have vanished from their traditional breeding areas after suffering more than any other bird or animal species in the war.
A third of their nests have been found to be empty in areas in the east of the country where they were once common.
Ukrainian ornithologists say surviving birds have adapted by breeding on landfill sites, feasting on mice and rats. Dozens of storks can be seen in rubbish dumps outside Ukraine’s second biggest city, Kharkiv.
After Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s government banned hunting and gamekeepers released thousands of pheasants. Ironically, the pheasants have benefitted from the shooting ban and can now be seen and heard not only in the countryside, calling from yellow feather grass, but in city gardens, along with quail and partridge.
Ukraine’s environment ministry was abolished last year and rolled into the ministry of industry and agriculture. Conservationists say protecting nature is regarded as a low priority and the war has affected nature reserves that are important breeding grounds for migratory species.
Moscow has repeatedly targeted six hydroelectric power stations and reservoirs along the Dnipro river that flows through war-torn areas in the east. In 2023, the Russian military blew up the Kakhovka dam, causing massive flooding that also destroyed ancient waterways.
Ornithologist Oleksandr Ponomarenko has told Birdlife International floodplains relaying on steady water flows have dried up.
“The stork sees its foraging area is dry, with no frogs, no snakes, nothing. So it doesn’t settle,” Ponomarenko said. “We’re losing the birds’ feeding grounds. The area is shrinking. In summer, it heats up terribly, 30 or 35 degrees. And so instead of there being water, there’s just bare mud.
Dmytro Medovnyk, a soldier and birdwatcher, carried out a scientific study while fighting in a village in the eastern Luhansk region in 2024. He found that, along with the pheasants, goldfinches and greenfinches had also benefitted from the fighting – they obtained food from destroyed grain warehouses.
The white stork has not been so lucky. As well as being the national emblem the stork is known in ancient folklore as the “bird of spring”, of hope and resurrection.
The sight of the remaining white storks in the west is keeping hope alive.