Ступінь вивченості й сучасний стан гніздових поселень баранця великого Gallinago media на заході України

Abstract

In the paper, we describe the state of knowledge of the Great Snipe population in Western Ukraine since 19 century. Almost to the middle of the XX century, the state of knowledge about this species and the size of the surveyed territory, especially within the borders of Western Polissia, were considered as insufficient. This was caused by the cryptic behavior of the species, its nocturnal activity, and generally by low population size and ra­rity. We analyzed a significant amount of ornithological resources devoted to observations of Great Snipe in Western Ukraine, which indicate historically low population size and scarcity of distribution of the species in the study area. According to the literature sources, studies of Great snipe were somewhat intensified in the XX century. At the same time, different authors pointed out drainage works in the Polissia area, as a negative factor that drives the decrease in Great Snipe numbers in the area. or even caused complete extinction in some regions. The main range of the species in the area was still localized in the Polissian part of Volyn and Rivne regions, especially in valleys of Prypiat, Turia, Tsyr and Lva rivers. At the end of XX and the beginning of XXI intensive studies of Great Snipe were conducted on the territory of Shatsk National Nature Park, where during 10 years of studies, seasons with an increase of local population were reported, but in general negative tendency was detected and the proposal to include the species into the national red list was published. Our recent studies focused on the species, allowed us to discover new lekking places of Great Snipe. Therefore, the actual information on current numbers and distribution of the species in the region of Western Ukraine is presented. Besides leks, places of occasional observations are also mentioned, which increases the information load of the paper regar­ding the current distribution of the species in the western part of the country. The current population size is estimated as 100 lekking males, based on the total sum from all known leks. We suppose, that the real population size in the region of Western Ukraine can reach 150–200 lekking males.