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

Russia sent kamikaze drones to attack the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in February. They hit buildings and killed several people. One unreported victim of the bombardment was a male long-eared owl, blinded in one eye and found with a badly broken wing. A passerby scooped up the stunned bird, put him in a box and took him to the city of Dnipro.The owl – nicknamed Sunny – is now recovering in a cosy room belonging to Veronica Konkova. No longer able to fly or hunt, Sunny instead hops around.Konkova said: “The fracture was so bad his left wing had to be amputated. The vet diagnosed 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 centre in Kyiv.Konkova, who is a biologist, has been rescuing wounded birds since 2015, a year after the Kremlin launched its then covert war in the eastern Donbas region. Her birds have included a rare imperial eagle, peregrine falcons, buzzards, kestrels, black kites and a variety of owls: little, short-eared and tawny.Alongside Sunny is a small, wide-eyed screech owl called Plushka, perched at the back of an open cage.Handler helps Sunny the injured owl – videoRussia’s aerial war has had a devastating impact on Ukraine’s wildlife, including its birds. Thousands have been caught in nets put up to protect roads near the frontline from marauding enemy drones.“The birds die from dehydration or from heart attacks if they get stuck upside down for a long time,” Konkova said. Others have been killed as a result of explosions, fires and pollution.Owls are frequently trapped in nets when they hunt at night. They also become entangled in thin fibre-optic cables from Russian drones; in some parts of the battlefield, the wire can carpet fields hundreds of metres wide.Konkova said: “Sometimes we can save these birds. Other times they arrive in such bad condition there’s nothing we can do.”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" class="entity-link entity-location" data-entity-id="20291" data-entity-type="location">Dnipro River. In 2023, the Russian military blew up the Kakhovka dam at the bottom of a Soviet-built cascade, causing massive flooding and destruction. Since the disaster, Ukrainian engineers have kept reservoir water levels low.Oleksandr Ponomarenko at the Dnipro-Oril nature reserve. The ornithologist says species including ducks and migratory geese have disappeared because of reduced water levels caused by Russian attacks. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianAccording to the ornithologist Oleksandr Ponomarenko, floodplains have dried up as a result: “We’re losing the birds’ feeding grounds. The area is shrinking. In summer, it gets really hot here, 30 or 35 degrees. And so instead of there being water, there’s just bare mud. It heats up terribly. The molluscs in it die, the algae dies. A huge part of the birds’ food supply is being destroyed. The species that used to fly in don’t visit.”Ponomarenko reeled off a list of birds that had disappeared from the Dnipro-Oril nature reserve where he is a senior researcher. Among them were two types of teal, ferruginous ducks, goldeneye and white-fronted geese.He said: “The goose is a very intelligent and cautious bird. They hear shooting, realise what’s going on and simply take a wide detour around the frontline. Now there’s almost no spring migration.”White storks – a national symbol in Ukraine – have suffered. A third of their nests are empty. “The stork sees its foraging area is dry, with no frogs, no snakes, nothing. So it doesn’t settle,” Ponomarenko said.The bird has 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, and near the riverside town of Samar. Ring ouzels and black storks have returned to Chornobyl.A birdwatching book in Oleksandr Ponomarenko’s hands. Ukraine has more than 400 species but the war has destroyed the habitats of many, including little egrets (pictured top). Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianThere is other good news. On a cold and windy day last week, three or four grebes could be seen at the Dnipro-Oril reserve, their numbers increasing. Also visible were yellow-legged gulls, a wood sandpiper and a newly returned swallow, swooping low over the water. “I recently saw about 60 swans. You don’t notice as many geese any more but in the autumn there are plenty of ducks,” said caretaker Mykhailo Petronko.After Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s government banned hunting and gamekeepers released thousands of pheasants. They can now be seen and heard not only in the countryside, calling from yellow feather grass, but in city gardens. Quail and partridge have also benefited from the shooting ban, together with roe deer and badgers.Dmytro Medovnyk, a soldier and birdwatcher, carried out a scientific study while fighting in a village in the eastern Luhansk oblast in 2024. He found that goldfinches and greenfinches obtained food from destroyed grain warehouses while populations of ravens and robins went down because of reduced food availability and noise pollution. The herons and mallards flew off.A chiffchaff hurt in an explosion is shown on a phone screen by Oleksandr Ponomarenko. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianPonomarenko described the picture for birds living in combat zones as “complicated”. “Different species react differently,” he said. Fires caused by artillery shells have wiped out the habit of many woodpeckers. Swifts and swallows, by contrast, continue to breed in some frontline areas, even nesting in semi-destroyed houses. Inventive species such as jays have started using discarded fibre-optic cables as nest lining, according to Ponomarenko.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. “The government doesn’t help. But nor does it create problems for us either,” Konkova said. Birdwatching was popular in Ukraine, she said, citing a livestream of a white stork sitting on a nest in the Poltava region.Veronica Konkova with Sunny. She has looked after many rescued birds, including eagles, falcons and buzzards. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianBack at her Dnipro home, Konkova showed off Sunny’s dinner: a dead lab rat stored in a downstairs freezer. The rats cost $2 each. Plushka, the other owl, prefers cockroaches, eating 18 to 20 live ones a day. The insects are kept in a plastic box in the kitchen. Neither owl can be returned to the wild but both should survive after treatment, Konkova says. That includes daily anti-worm medicine, administered by syringe into Sunny’s beak.Originally from occupied Crimea, Konkova said she detested what Russia had done to her country. “They destroy their own environment and our environment as well,” she said, but added: “Overall, I’m an optimist because nature will win anyway. Birds lived for millions of years before people. They will live, I guess, millions of years after people.”