Almost 16 thousand small digs were counted in the area. The Hunting and Fishing Committee of the Saratov region summarized the results of the census of the red book, a bird from the digs family. This is the first time that such a large-scale census of these birds has taken place in the region: work has been carried out throughout the region. "In the last century, the little mole was common in the Saratov region. At the end of the 1990s its numbers began to decrease and in 2001 it was included in the Red Book as a rare species. The main reason for the decrease in population was the total plowing of large areas of land for sunflower and corn crops, and as we know, short and open areas of land are small and dry areas. Grass vegetation. Considering the fact that during all this time a full census of this Red Book bird was not carried out, except for selective studies 10 years ago, we decided to determine the structure and size of the small burrowing population," said the minister and chairman of the committee Alexander Gavrilov. The count was made at the beginning of the autumn migration, when the bird takes wing. A total of 38 tracks were placed that evenly covered the established bird habitat types. Their total length was 950 kilometers. Groups of up to 20-30 individuals were recorded along the routes. It turned out that the core of the range had moved to the southeast of the area. To a greater extent, the small excavation is concentrated in Uzhinsky, Dragachevsky, Perliovsky districts and in the southern parts of Ershovsky and Krasnokotsky districts. The estimated number of small digs in the pre-migration period in 2026 was 15,739 individuals.