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

A kamikaze drone attack by Russian forces on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in February struck buildings, killed several people and left an unreported victim: a male long-eared owl, blinded in one eye and with a severely broken wing. A passerby found the stunned bird, placed it in a box and transported it to the city of Dnipro.

The owl, nicknamed Sunny, is now recovering in a room at the home of volunteer Veronica Konkova. No longer able to fly or hunt, Sunny hops around instead.

“The fracture was so bad his left wing had to be amputated. The vet diagnosed brain trauma. Sunny doesn’t react normally to light,” Konkova said.

The owl will remain at Konkova’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 initially covert war in the eastern Donbas region. Her rescues include a rare imperial eagle, peregrine falcons, buzzards, kestrels, black kites and various owls: little, short-eared and tawny.

Alongside Sunny is a small, wide-eyed screech owl named Plushka, perched at the back of an open cage.

Russia’s aerial war has had a devastating impact on Ukraine’s wildlife, including birds. Thousands have become trapped in nets placed to protect roads near the frontline from 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 by explosions, fires and pollution.

Owls are frequently caught in nets when they hunt at night. They also become entangled in thin fiber-optic cables from Russian drones; in some battlefield areas, the wire can carpet fields hundreds of meters wide.

“Sometimes we can save these birds. Other times they arrive in such bad condition there’s nothing we can do,” Konkova said.

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. In 2023, the Russian military destroyed 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.

According to 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 listed birds that have disappeared from the Dnipro-Oril nature reserve, where he is a senior researcher. Among them are two types of teal, ferruginous ducks, goldeneye and white-fronted geese.

“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,” he said.

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, feeding on mice and rats. Dozens of storks can be seen in rubbish dumps outside Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and near the riverside town of Samar. Ring ouzels and black storks have returned to Chornobyl.

There 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, conducted a scientific study while fighting in a village in the eastern Luhansk region in 2024. He found that goldfinches and greenfinches obtained food from destroyed grain warehouses while populations of ravens and robins declined due to reduced food availability and noise pollution. Herons and mallards flew off.

Ponomarenko described the situation for birds living in combat zones as “complicated.” “Different species react differently,” he said. Fires caused by artillery shells have wiped out the habitat 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 fiber-optic cables as nest lining, according to Ponomarenko.

Ukraine’s environment ministry was abolished last year and merged 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.

Back at her Dnipro home, Konkova showed 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 said. 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.”