A Neglected Treasure.
Inland Wader Migration in Ukraine

By Paul Bradbeer

One of the most frequent questions I am asked as a birder and one of the most difficult to answer satisfactorily is: “What is your favourite bird?” The problem with this is that it is the sheer variety of bird species that attracts me to birding in the first place and that any species can be a favourite at any particular moment. For most birders it is much easier to name one family or group of birds rather than just a single species as possessing a special magic and in my case this group is waders. In the course of over forty years of birding, that is since the age of seven, waders have commanded my attention more than any other group. This is partly because during my childhood my parents, who are birders, bought a holiday home close to a tidal inlet on the south of coast of England which is famous for waders. Regular birding trips around this nature reserve Pagham Harbour obviously gave me a fondness for waders from an early age. I remember being particularly upset when I heard the news that a Wilson’s Phalarope, a vagrant from America, which had entertained me and dozens of other birders at this reserve in October 1972, had been shot by some ignorant or malicious “cowboy” hunter, happily a rather unlikely fate for a rarity in Britain today. As a young adult I devoted a lot of effort to waders on birding holidays abroad, in the USA, at the fabulous Azraq oasis in Jordan (regrettably this site is now mostly dried out), in Morocco, India and Gambia. My thirteen years in Ukraine have only confirmed my preference for this charismatic group of birds.

Avocet by Sylvain Hellio

I am hardly alone in being a wader enthusiast for waders have long been a popular group among birders from Northwest Europe and North America. Waders are generously covered in identification literature, species or family monographs and, of course, on the internet, which provides excellent opportunities to familiarise yourself with photographs of unfamiliar species. In Britain alone there are dozens of wardened nature reserves where one of the main objectives is to protect breeding, passage and wintering waders and at the same time show them to the public, using observation hides, illustrated identification boards and guided walks. Over most of England it is difficult to visit a major wader wintering or migration site without meeting other birders. By contrast, in Ukraine I have hardly ever run into other birders by chance, however famous or accessible the site.

There is a host of reasons why waders hold such appeal for birders. One factor is that over most of Europe and North America waders account for a significant proportion of the available bird species, comprising 12 per cent of both the British list and the Ukrainian list. Even in world terms, at about 210 species, waders make a major contribution to avian biodiversity, 2 per cent of the total number of bird species. It is worth remembering that waders are not one single bird family, but rather a group of related families in the order Charadriformes which also includes Skuas, Gulls and Terns. It is also worth reflecting that while we in Europe are mostly concerned with waders as highly migratory wetland birds, over half the world’s wader species, notably plovers, snipe, stone curlews, pratincoles, breed in tropical or southern latitudes and are either sedentary or perform purely local migrations in response to fluctuating water levels. Indeed, one family of waders, the coursers specialise in dry arid habitats and at the other extreme, the woodcocks are adapted to life in woodland and have several species endemic to various tropical islands in eastern Asia. The more you look into the world of waders, the more surprises and paradoxes you find. For example the species I see the least often of our regular waders both in Britain and in Ukraine is the Eurasian Woodcock and yet at an estimated 15 million individuals it is probably the most numerous wader in the world. All the variety and complexity of waders as a group only adds to their fascination and there is at least one British birder (not me unfortunately) who has made a serious attempt to see all the species of waders in the world.

Perhaps the outstanding quality of waders and a major reason for their appeal to birders is their sheer liveliness, alertness and restlessness, their capacity to evoke nature at its most wild. This could just be my subjective impression, but it’s interesting to note that in a typical urban area with quite varied and abundant birdlife, such as the part of south London where I grew up, Cormorants, Grey Herons, gulls, Canada Geese, several duck species, Coots and Moorhens were a regular sight on park ponds, but the only wader to appear would be a very occasional Common Sandpiper. Being highly sensitive to disturbance and requiring areas of wet grassland or mud for feeding, waders are clearly one of the groups of birds least adapted to the standard urban environment (excepting reservoirs, sewage farms and wetland urban nature reserves, of course). It is also significant that in contrast to the numerous and varied captive collections of ducks, geese and swans, waders are not often found and are probably very hard to keep, let alone breed, in captivity.

Returning to subjective impressions, waders, unlike ducks and gulls do not as a rule give an air of being lazy, of loafing, seeming alert even when asleep, nor do they often appear static as herons often do. Waders’ diverse techniques of feeding all produce an impression of intense yet elegant activity, whether it is plovers making their brisk runs followed by a forward tilt to pick up prey, the constant probing of Dunlins and Curlew Sandpipers, the cooperative dashing of Spotted Redshank for fish in the shallows or the spinning of swimming phalaropes as they deftly peck at food items on the surface. Although waders can be comparatively approachable where there is little hunting as in India, on the whole they are highly wary and prone to take flight at the slightest suspicion of danger, even when another wader such as a lone Black-tailed Godwit flies in with the size and flight style of a falcon causing a momentary panic. I witnessed a more genuine case of alarm recently on 4 May at Bulahovka liman when I saw clouds of distant Ruff swirling round and enveloping a large falcon (probably a northward-bound Peregrine) in a manner which recalls the way flocks of Starlings can mob migrant Booted Eagles in the same area in autumn.

Most waders are consummate fliers and this mastery of flight adds greatly to their attraction for birders. This quality is at its most spectacular in the lightning-fast manouevres of a flock of Dunlin, where the birds are so tightly packed it seems a miracle they don’t collide. The strength of waders in flight is inseparable from their prodigious feats of migration; at least as far as northern hemisphere breeders are concerned. The migratory status of waders in Ukraine is underlined by their almost complete absence from inland areas in winter and the dramatic appearance of passage migrants in spring and autumn. I have yet to familiarise myself with the details of ringing recoveries from Ukraine, but it was good to see in Sergei Khomenko’s article in “Waterbirds around the World” (Edinburgh 2006) evidence that confirmed my assumption that the Curlew Sandpipers that stop off at Sivash winter as far away as South Africa. Their migration there from the Taimyr is one of the most extreme, though far from unusual, performances in wader migration. Whether breeding on the Siberian tundra, taiga or a swampy forest just across the Belarus border, the waders that migrate through Ukraine can inspire in the imagination an image of remote, wild and beautiful places. I haven’t much experience of northern waders on their breeding grounds, but childhood holidays in Wales have given me a taste of this, anxious Golden Plovers distracting me from their nest on boggy moorland plateaus, the bubbling song of Curlews and the thrilling drumming of Snipe over rushy sheep pasture. The vocalisations of waders, and waders are generally highly vocal except for the Ruff, often have a wonderful haunting quality, whether it is the mournful whistle of Grey and Golden Plovers or the energetic ringing alarm calls of Greenshanks and Green Sandpipers. Their sounds as much as anything in their lifestyle create their poetry of wildness.

I can add many other factors explaining the popularity of waders, the decorative splendour of their breeding dress, the more subtle attractions of their juvenile and winter plumages, the challenge they often give to identification, their propensity to vagrancy — you can always expect (or at least hope for) the unexpected and I should not forget the spectacle and convenience to the observer of waders’ habit of flocking together. At a good feeding site you might have twenty species of wader spread out before you like delicacies laid out for a sumptuous banquet -none of the frustration of waiting and seeing nothing, which you can get with other types of birding, including forest birding, seawatching and sometimes even raptor watching.

Anybody interested in watching waders in Ukraine would be well advised to concentrate upon the coastal sites like Sivash, where the big numbers are and the major IBAs are located. For my part, I’ve certainly enjoyed some memorable moments at Black Sea wader hotspots, the best of which come from an active period in 1997; locating my first Bar-tailed Godwit in Ukraine at the lower part of the Tiligulski Liman on 1 June, encountering my first Collared Pratincoles and Terek sandpipers in Ukraine during an expedition with staff from the Black Sea-Azov Sea Ornithological Station at Sivash in mid June, watching a concentration of over 2,000 Curlew Sandpipers on a saltmarsh pool south of Evpatoria on 20 July and then finding another Terek Sandpiper on a lagoon just behind the beach east of Feodosia in mid August the same year. Nevertheless, a combination of work, family obligations and financial limitations have compelled me to concentrate most of my efforts at inland localities near Dnepropetrovsk, where I live. This is much less of a disadvantage than it might seem, because, as the late Anatoli Gubkin and his colleagues in Dnepropetrovsk assured me, their oblast boasts some first class wader sites where several species rare in Western Europe could be counted as regular.

Naturally, I was eager to confirm all this for myself and ever since my first visits to local wetlands in spring 1996 I have become just as much a Dnepropetrovsk oblast patriot as the ornithologists born and educated in this region. Over the years I’ve seen 41 wader species in the oblast with a total of 37 at what used to be the best and my most frequently visited single site, the Samarski Ribkhoz just northeast of Dnepropetrovsk. Occupying about ten square kilometers and containing at least 25 ponds of various sizes, this was clearly a wetland on a massive scale. During the spring and autumn at any one time several of the ponds would be partially drained to facilitate the catching of fish and the resulting expanses of shallow water, wet mudflats and low islands provided ideal conditions for waders and other waterfowl. It was a pity that the refilling of the partially drained ponds in late spring-early summer would inundate the islands where terns, Black-winged Stilts, Redshank and Little Ringed Plovers were nesting. However, during the summer of 2000 one of the largest ponds was not refilled at all, enabling waders to have a fair chance at breeding. It was here that on 30 May, just after a refreshing shower, I was amazed to see a large exotic looking wader with improbably long bright yellow legs, a White-tailed Lapwing standing erect besides a reed fringed muddy pool. It was joined by a second bird and they flew off on rounded Lapwing like wings to another pond where after standing around for a while and dwarfing the nearby Little Ringed Plovers they proceeded briefly to copulate. This indicated that it would be worth checking out later for a nest and sure enough two weeks later I took my friend Piotr Chegorko to the site where he photographed the pair and their clutch of four eggs on a small island where other waders were also nesting. Regrettably, the White tailed Lapwings abandoned their nesting attempt a week later after a severe hail storm, but this loss was part of a larger success story with a major invasion of White tailed Lapwings into Europe that year, resulting in their establishment as a regular breeder in the Rumanian section of the Danube Delta and the consolidation of their breeding status in the Shpindiyar depression in Chersson oblast. From the year 2005 the Samarskii Ribkhoz declined in its attraction as a birding site because an increasing number of ponds were taken out of production and I stopped visiting after October 2007 when to my disappointment I found no ponds offering suitable habitat for waders. Meanwhile I had shifted my attention to the Petrikovskii Ribkhoz complex, managing to contribute Pectoral Sandpiper as a provisional addition to Ukraine’s bird list with single juveniles on the same pond on 26 September 2004 and 14 September 2008. This distinctively plumaged, rather long necked calidris, which could originate either from the Siberian or the North American tundra, has turned out to be a regular rarity in Hungary and is thus a likely candidate for further appearances in Ukraine. I don’t have the equipment to photograph birds, but I got perfectly reasonable views in my scope, the second bird being obligingly close. The current economic climate is unkind to the fishpond business and this spring the once vast Petrikovskii Ribkhoz was down to only three working ponds.

Little Ringed Plover on IBA “Bilosarayska kosa” (Donetsk region) by Igor Komarov

The reduction of these artificial wader habitats encourages me to concentrate more upon the remaining natural habitats. A hundred years ago the ornithologist Walch observed significant wader passage along the mudbanks of the Dnieper, but the damming of this river in the Soviet era has long since destroyed this habitat in Dnepropetrovsk oblast. Occasionally a sandbank is exposed below the dam at Dneprodzherzinsk, which attracts waders, and on one exceptional occasion on 27 August 2001 when the water level was particularly low there were six species of calidris waders on the mudflats including my first Knot for Dnepropetrovsk oblast. The principal wader habitat within easy reach of Dnepropetrovsk by marschroutka lies in the Samara floodplain, as Anatoli Gubkin and his colleagues revealled to me upon my first arrival in Ukraine. The focal points are Bulahovka liman, which is surrounded by extensive flood meadows, the 500 hectare Soloniy Liman, sandwiched between the village of Novotroitske and the Samara Forest and a small narrow saline liman southwest of Znamenovka village. None of these places has any legal protection above the zakaznik level, they are all subject to spring hunting and none appears to be wardened or managed for wildlife. Before I started visiting the place the shores of Bulahovka liman used to be open and grassy, thus highly suitable for waders. Over recent years a semicontinuous margin of reeds has encompassed the liman making viewing more difficult and choking out the wader habitat. A local biologist attributes this to runoff of nutrients from a massive pig farm in the area. Nevertheless, two impressive spots remain, a shallow pool in the saline flats north of the liman and nearby the partly isolated northwest arm of the liman itself, which can draw over a thousand waders in spring — mostly Lapwing and Ruff but with a rich mix of other species. During a hot summer these wader oases can dry out, but if the water level of the main liman falls sufficiently, muddy shores become exposed which pull in waders on their autumn passage. In particularly dry years Bulahovka liman can dry out completely as can the others, but rarely all three at the same time. Soloniy Liman, eight kilometers west of Bulahovka is a popular local tourist resort and also has a large and hungry colony of Caspian Gulls (Larus cachinnans). Despite this, it supports up to 30 pairs of Avocets and other waders both nesting and on passage. It is unusual to see more than twenty people at a time relaxing by the lake and waders seem to tolerate this low level of disturbance. In July and August it is perfectly normal to see recently fledged Avocets, Black-winged Stilts and the post breeding flock of Kentish Plovers in the same telescope view as humans smearing themselves with medicinal mud like miniature hippopotami, a sight I certainly cannot see in my native Britain!

Taking both sites together, I’ve seen a total of 36 wader species at Bulahovka and Soloniy Liman including annual Terek Sandpipers and regular Marsh Sandpipers, Broad-billed Sandpipers and Red-necked Phalaropes, all scarce species in Western Europe and rather underreported in inland Ukraine. Admittedly, the numbers of these species are small compared to the top sites on the coast, but, all the same it is a challenge to find these birds and I feel that my spring is incomplete if I miss any of them. Yesterday, 19 May, I was delighted to see for the first time this spring the most graceful and decorative of them all, five female Red-necked Phalaropes, swimming with the buoyancy of little paper boats in the company of Ruff (which were also swimming) at Bulahovka liman. During the spring migration waders move through so quickly that these are often quiet periods between the successive waves of migration and if you miss birding for a week, you can easily miss out on your chance to see several species entirely. Fortunately, there is a second chance to see most of these waders during their return migration, which for the elegant, long-legged, tringa group is normally underway as early as mid June. The most showy among this group is the Spotted Redshank, whose velvety black breeding dress is irresistible. I have been lucky to see them on five out of nine visits to Bulahovka in different Junes. These birds will presumably have been females, which leave their arctic breeding grounds as soon as their eggs have hatched, the males remaining to tend the young. Later, the second half of July sees the peak migration of returning adult Curlew Sandpipers and Broad-billed Sandpipers, which spend little more than a month on their arctic breeding duties. My top local count for Curlew Sandpipers was at a small, narrow saline liman southwest of Znamenovka village, where on 17 July 2002 I saw 40 in glorious russet breeding plumage alongside 24 dark and stripy Broad-billed Sandpipers, a classic species combination. I have visited this site less than the others as the spread of reed growth along the shores has made it less attractive to waders over the past few years. Nevertheless, it is located in the middle of a fascinating area of meadow and wetland, which is used as a hunting ground by raptors from the Samara Forest including Imperial Eagle, so the site will receive many further visits.

The importance of the Samara Floodplain for waders and birds in general was well appreciated by Dnepropetrovshina’s pioneering ornithologist, Walch, over a hundred years ago (see the article “Ptashinye Naselenniya Stepovoi Ukraiini Sto Rokiv Tomu” by Petro Chegorka in Ptach No1 Vecna 2009). While human disturbance, landuse changes and habitat degradation have had a negative impact on the area’s birdlife, enough remains to make this the most spectacular area for wetland birding within easy reach by public transport from Dnepropetrovsk. Yet when I consider the numerous other wetlands in Dnepropetrovsk oblast which I have not visited, the Orel valley, the reservoirs around Krivoy Rog for example and that most of Ukraine is low lying country, generously endowed with wetlands most of which would long ago have been drained or otherwise developed had they been in western Europe, it becomes obvious that there must be dozens of inland wader sites equivalent in value to my favourite places near Dnepropetrovsk and probably most of them are hardly ever visited by birdwatchers. Even if none of these sites meet IBA criteria for waders, it is likely that, taken as a whole, they might be just as significant as Ukraine’s coastal sites as migration stopovers for certain wader species and also for some breeding species. For example a twelve day coordinated wetland survey for the entire coastal area of Ukraine in mid August 2004 produced rather low figures for certain waders which are widespread migrants inland; only 49 Temminck’s Stints, 207 Common Sandpipers, 177 Little ringed Plovers and 473 Snipe. An inland survey at this time could have exceeded the coastal count for these species and provided a significant supplement for others, such as Greenshank, Green Sandpipers and Wood Sandpipers.

Despite this wealth of waders away from the coast, my impression is that, with certain notable exceptions like the enthusiastic team working at a Cholgyn Reserve, Lviv Oblast, birders in Ukraine’s interior tend to neglect this fascinating group. For many birders in Ukraine waders have the reputation of being difficult to identify, hard to get good views of without prohibitively expensive optics and prone to fly away as you approach with less powerful optics in an attempt to get a halfway decent view. These problems can be overcome with a little preparation and patience. The Ukrainian Field Guide (Bokotei, Fesenko) has very useful descriptions and illustrations of waders in their various plumages. Spring and summer is a good time to get to know waders when many species have a bright and distinctive breeding plumage. When they take flight all is not lost as this is when they reveal such prominent features as wing bars, a white rump or a combination of these, their absence also being useful to identification, as in the plain upperparts of Little Ringed Plover. The frequent vocalisations of waders are also a gift for identification. There are 30 wader species in Ukraine I can recognise by call note alone (though in some cases it helps at least to see the silhouette of the caller). Obviously, if you don’t have access to CD recordings of waders, you can build up knowledge of calls from the more cooperative waders that let you first identify them from appearance. A lot of waders return to a favourite feeding spot after you’ve accidentally flushed them, so it’s worth waiting for frightened birds to return. Even if you do not live within easy reach of a major wetland, most of you, judging from the example of friends across Dnepropetrovsk oblast, have access to ponds, flood meadows and rivers that are visited by waders in small numbers. I imagine that most birders living in lowland area of Ukraine have the chance to find ten to fifteen wader species a year within comfortable cycling distance of their homes. So, when you’re out in the countryside this summer or early autumn, you might be surprised to discover what waders you can find. Waders are one of Ukraine’s and the world’s more undervalued treasures and they are far more accessible to be enjoyed than we imagine.