Ukrainian Ringing Centre

The Ukrainian Bird Ringing Centre was established in accordance with a decision of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in May 1992. Our activities include research, management and other coordination of activities related to bird banding; carrying out ringing and corresponding studies; production and subsequent transferring of rings to regional ringers; maintaining bird banding databases and related activities. In 1997 Ukraine was accepted as a full member in EURING.

In the first few years of the operation of our Centre, the main problem was supplying ornithologists with bird rings for scientific purposes. In 1994 staff of the Centre started to produce aluminium rings themselves, marked “KIEV”. In total, 40 thousand of these rings were made.

Since 1995, the Ukrainian Bird Ringing Centre has received different kinds of rings marked “KIEV UKRAINE”, manufactured  to international standards of quality. These rings were produced in Poland (“Aranea”) with support of Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries of the Netherlands and the Gdansk Ornithological Station. In addition to “Aranea”, since 2004 bird rings for Ukraine were also produced by “Porzana Ltd” (Great Britain) supported by a grant from “The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust”. At present the Centre uses 22 kinds of rings which allow banding of all bird species distributed in Ukraine. It should be noted that “KIEV” rings are also used outside of Ukraine, for instance on Vernadskyi Antarctic Station for ringing 921 birds of five species.

One of the main tasks of the Centre is the maintenance of our database of recoveries of birds spatially connected with the territory of Ukraine. Nowadays this database includes more than 16,000  recoveries from different parts of the World. In a year, the Centre collects information on recovery reports of several hundreds of banded birds. These are birds which were banded with either “KIEV” or “MOSKWA” rings in Ukraine, and birds with rings of other banding centers found in Ukraine. These recoveries have been collected for more than 100 years. On the territory of the country, the first ringed birds were found in 1911. We have about 4200 recoveries with "KIEV" rings, which have been submitted to the EURING databank and are included in this Migration Atlas.

At present an “Atlas of Migrations of Birds of Ukraine” is being prepared. The database being used for the analyses includes  more than sixteen thousand  recoveries connected with the territory of the country. The first 16 species texts are posted on the website of Centre . A further 20 species texts (Anseriformes) have been prepared and will be added to the Atlas.

The staff of the Ringing Centre were the organizers and main authors of “Encyclopedia of migratory species of wild animals of Ukraine”. Poluda A.M. (Editor).  Kyiv, 2018. – 694 p. , which consists of 315 species texts (289 being birds). To detail the seasonal bird migrations, the data of the Centre, accumulated over more than 100 years, were used.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, the annual volume of ringing in Ukraine has declined quite sharply.   In 1976–2001 Ukrainian ornithologists banded from 40 to 60 thousand birds. Considerable quantities of birds were banded in the 1990s but average numbers decreased gradually to 20 thousand, and in 2010–2020 to 5-10 thousand per year. The main reason for this is the lack of a sufficient number of rings.

Colour ringing studies are relatively active in Ukraine. Such studies have included Cormorants, White and Black Storks, Mute Swans, Avocets, Eurasian Oystercatchers, Kentish Plovers, Dunlin, Ruff, Black-headed Gulls, Mediterranean Gulls, Yellow-legged Gulls,  Pallas’s Gulls and a number of other bird species. Due to colour ringing, we receive a good number of recoveries, despite the reduction in ringing with only metal rings.