Blinded and broken, Sunny the owl becomes another casualty of Russia’s war | Birds

Russia sent kamikaze drones to attack the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in February. They hit buildings and killed several people. An unreported casualty of the bombing was a male short-eared owl, blinded in one eye and found with a badly broken wing. A passerby picked up the stunned bird, put it in a box and took it to the city of Dnipro.

The owl – nicknamed Sunny – is now recovering in a comfortable room belonging to Veronica Konkova. No longer able to fly or hunt, Sunny hops around instead.

Konkova said: “The fracture was so severe that her left wing had to be amputated. The vet diagnosed a brain trauma. Sunny doesn’t react normally to light.”

The owl will stay at the volunteer’s home for several weeks before being transferred to a rehabilitation center in kyiv.

Konkova, a biologist, has been rescuing injured birds since 2015, a year after the Kremlin launched its then-secret war in the eastern Donbass region. Its birds include a rare imperial eagle, peregrine falcons, buzzards, kestrels, black kites and a variety of owls: small, short-eared and tawny.

Beside Sunny is a small, wide-eyed owl named Plushka, perched at the bottom of an open cage.

The Russian air war has had a devastating impact on Ukraine’s wildlife, particularly its birds. Thousands of people were caught in nets deployed to protect roads near the front line from marauding enemy drones.

“Birds die from dehydration or heart attacks if they get stuck upside down for a long time,” Konkova said. Others were killed by explosions, fires or pollution.

Owls are often trapped in nets when hunting at night. They also get tangled in the thin fiber optic cables of Russian drones; in some parts of the battlefield, wire can cover fields several hundred meters wide.

Konkova said: “Sometimes we can save these birds. Other times they arrive in such bad condition that we can’t do anything.”

The war has affected nature reserves which constitute important breeding areas for migratory species.

Moscow has repeatedly targeted six hydroelectric plants and reservoirs along the Dnipro River. In 2023, the Russian army blew up the Kakhovka Dam at the foot of a Soviet-built waterfall, causing massive flooding and destruction. Since the disaster, Ukrainian engineers have kept water levels in reservoirs low.

According to ornithologist Oleksandr Ponomarenko, the floodplains have dried up as a result: “We are losing bird feeding areas. The area is decreasing. In summer it is very hot here, 30 or 35 degrees. And so instead of water there is only bare mud. It heats up terribly. The molluscs there die, the algae die. A lot of the bird food is destroyed. who used to steal, do not visit.

Ponomarenko compiled a list of extinct birds from the Dnipro-Oril nature reserve, where he is a senior researcher. Among them were two types of teal, rusty ducks, goldeneyes and white-fronted geese.

He said: “The goose is a very intelligent and careful bird. They hear shots, realize what is happening and just take a wide detour around the front line. Now there is almost no spring migration.”

White storks – a national symbol in Ukraine – have suffered. A third of their nests are empty. “The stork sees that its feeding area is dry, no frogs, no snakes, nothing. So it doesn’t settle down,” Ponomarenko said.

The bird adapted by breeding in landfills, feasting on mice and rats. Dozens of storks can be seen in landfills outside Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and near the riverside town of Samar. Ouzels and black storks are back in Chernobyl.

There is more good news. On a cold and windy day last week, three or four grebes could be seen in the Dnipro-Oril reserve, with their numbers increasing. Yellow-legged Gulls, a Wood Sandpiper and a newly returned Swallow, diving low above the water, were also visible. “I recently saw about 60 swans. You don’t notice so many geese anymore, but in autumn there are a lot of ducks,” said keeper Mykhailo Petronko.

After Vladimir Putin’s large-scale invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian government banned hunting and game wardens released thousands of pheasants. They can now be seen and heard not only in the countryside, calling from the yellow feather grass, but also in city gardens. Quail and partridges also benefited from the hunting ban, as did roe deer and badgers.

Dmytro Medovnyk, a soldier and amateur ornithologist, conducted a scientific study while fighting in a village in the eastern Luhansk Oblast in 2024. He found that goldfinches and greenfinches were obtaining food from destroyed grain warehouses, while populations of crows and robins were declining due to reduced food availability and noise pollution. The herons and mallards took flight.

Ponomarenko called the situation of birds living in combat zones “complicated.” “Different species react differently,” he said. Fires caused by artillery shells have destroyed the habits of many woodpeckers. On the other hand, swifts and swallows continue to breed in some front-line areas, even nesting in half-destroyed houses. According to Ponomarenko, inventive species such as jays have started using discarded fiber optic cables as nest linings.

Ukraine’s Environment Ministry was abolished last year and incorporated into the Ministry of Industry and Agriculture. Environmentalists say nature protection is considered a low priority. “The government doesn’t help. But it doesn’t create problems for us either,” Konkova said. Birdwatching is popular in Ukraine, she said, citing a live broadcast of a white stork sitting on a nest in the Poltava region.

Back home in Dnipro, Konkova showed Sunny dinner: a dead lab rat kept in a downstairs freezer. Rats cost $2 each. Plushka, the other owl, prefers cockroaches, and eats 18 to 20 live ones per day. The insects are kept in a plastic box in the kitchen. Neither owl can be released into the wild, but both are expected to survive after treatment, Konkova says. This includes daily anti-worm medication, administered by syringe in Sunny’s beak.

Originally from occupied Crimea, Konkova said she hated what Russia had done to her country. “They’re destroying their own environment and our environment as well,” she said, before adding: “Overall, I’m optimistic because nature will win anyway. Birds lived millions of years before humans. They will live, I suspect, millions of years after humans.”