TL:DR – The national bird of Ukraine is the White Stork (Ciconia ciconia), we occasionally see them in the local fenland. Often they are ringed birds or birds that have escaped into the wild from collections.
I went looking for a White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) that had been seen at the marina in the nearby village Earith this morning. I was lucky enough to catch sight of it on the wing circling with numerous gulls and several Grey Herons before it headed upstream and out of sight along the Great River Ouse.
As many readers will know, the White Stork is the national bird of Ukraine, feels rather poignant to have seen one today. Birdwatcher Oleksandr Ruchko writing in The Guardian from Lviv had this to say on seeing the birds return to his homeland:
The stork is very sacred to Ukrainians, a symbol of spring, of babies, and of peace. They are believed to be a kind of amulet, and protect your house against evil. Nobody here ever kills storks to eat, not even in the worst times
The White Stork is widespread on the continent and a bird of fable and legend even to this day in the British Isles despite our having driven it to extinction in the middle ages. Last nesting pair was observed in Edinburgh in 1416. Today, there are a couple of dozen seen sporadically in the UK, some will have come from collections. The one I saw today was unringed but well have been released from a breeding program or other place. Equally, it may well have arrived from continental Europe…perhaps even Ukraine, itself, no way to know for certain.
Meanwhile, I also went back for another look at the Garganey and female Blue-winged Teal on the flood. I caught the Garganey in flight and was rather hoping that I’d inadvertently caught the female Blue-winged Teal in flight too. But, it his looks like a female Garganey chasing a drake Garganey. Funnily enough, the drake has quite a reputation having mated on several occasions over the last few weeks…with the female Blue-winged Teal. So maybe the female Garganey has taken umbrage…hah!
The Garganeys are thought to have headed north from Spain when it got too dry for them there early in the year. There have been lots of reported sightings of this bird in the UK in the last few weeks. The Blue-winged Teal dropped in not long after a Green-winged Teal had already been sighted. Those are both American birds that should really be heading south for Texas not Cambridgeshire, but presumably chose the wrong line of latitude when they set off from The Arctic earlier in the year.
After the garganeys, I spent some time watching Whitethroats, tried to get a photo of one of the Cetti’s Warblers, snapped a Sedge Warbler, and spotted my first Orange Tip butterfly of the year.
