‘Holy grail’: Nest of extremely rare bird captured on video in Russia
The Nordmann’s greenshank, also called the spotted greenshank, is among the most threatened migratory shorebirds in the world. With fewer than 2,000 individuals estimated to live in the wild today, the species is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. Much of the bird’s life, both in Russia and in parts of Asia, however, remains a mystery.
“Almost nothing is known about their breeding ecology, which makes this new discovery so important,” Pronkevich, who has been studying the Nordmann’s greenshank in Russia for decades, said in a statement.
Nests of the bird could have previously gone undetected because of various reasons, Jonathan Slaght, the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which partly supported the study, told Mongabay in an email.
While the birds forage along the coast where they can be seen more easily from boats, they go deep into larch forests in very remote locations to nest. In those areas, there are bears and an inhospitable landscape to deal with, which makes getting to the nests a logistical challenge. Numbers of the Nordmann’s greenshank are also declining, which “means that, even if researchers can reach the proper habitat to look for a nest, there may no longer be any birds there,” Slaght said.
“Plenty of Russian scientists have documented evidence of breeding — displaying adults and downy chicks — so the overall distribution of breeding Nordmann’s greenshanks is relatively well known, but the nests themselves have proven elusive for the reasons listed above,” Slaght added.
The last person to have observed a Nordmann’s greenshank nesting, some four decades back, was Russian ornithologist Vitalii Nechaev, Slaght said, who saw the bird actually building a nest by breaking twigs from trees and placing them on a branch.
In fact, building nests in trees makes the Nordmann’s greenshank stand out among other sandpipers, which usually nest on the ground on beaches. Only two other sandpiper species, the green sandpiper (Tringa ochropus) and the solitary sandpiper (Tringa solitaria), are known to nest in trees. But even these two species tend to use old nests of songbirds and other species, Slaght said, and not build one from scratch like the Nordmann’s greenshank has been observed to do.
The nest that Pronkevich, Maleko and Konstantin Maslovskii, a junior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, observed in June, however, failed, with at least two eggs having been eaten by crows.
