Cheryl Does Fulbright

Last Day in Vladivostok

2007-11-15T18:07:00.000-08:00

Today (November 15) is my last day in Vladivostok on the Fulbright. It is hard to believe I have been in Russia for almost 10 months now! Today is a beautiful, crystal clear and cold Thursday, not a cloud in sight, and with the thermometers showing a brisk minus 4 degrees C at noon, Vladivostokians have donned their hats in acquiescence to the undeniable fact that for today, at least, winter is upon us. The wind that is so characteristic of this city is whipping with an icy fierceness through the streets, up and down the hills, making whitecaps on the royal blue waters of Amur bay. But the air is fresh and clean, and the brilliant sunshine makes everything here look bright, from the new condos downtown to billboards and fresh campaign posters. (

Russia

has elections for the national legislature on December 2.) Despite the cold -- and cold, after all, cold is Russia, the state that seems most natural to this country, perhaps, the state in which Russia is at her best...It is lovely here today.

I can’t believe I am leaving already! But I hope that soon I will be back.

Visit to Kedrovaya Pad (Oct 22 - 28, 2007)

2007-11-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

At the end of October I went to visit Kedrovaya Pad Zapovednik (nature reserve), which is located across the bay from Vladivostok. Founded way back in 1916 (!), Kedrovaya Pad is a very small, nearly circular-shaped reserve on just 18,000 hectares, about 15 km across. Although Kedrovaya Pad was initially envisioned as (and historically has been) a "floral" zapovednik (the plants and trees here are very well studied!), it is most famous today as one of the very few places on Earth inhabited by the Far Eastern leopard, the world's most endangered cat. While most leopards live further south, in India, Africa, Asia, there is one sub-population in the Russian Far East. Unfortunately, the latest statistics indicate there are only about 30 of them left in the wild. They inhabit a small zone between Vladivostok and the Chinese border. Although the leopard has been severely endangered (30-40 individuals) since the 1970s, only recently has this animal become a major subject of Russian and international attention. This means Kedrovaya Pad, too, has been in the spotlight.

These first two pictures are the Kedrovaya River. The zapovednik is in the Kedrovaya River Valley. The reserve includes the river's headwaters, but not the mouth -- the zapovednik boundary is 3-4 km from where the river flows into the Amur Bay. The river is home to only one salmon species -- cherry salmon, found only in Russia and Asia (not North America). Poaching is a big problem every August, when salmon enter the river to spawn. Reserve rangers estimate they removed 70 nets from the mouth of the Kedrovaya River this year! (And this river is only about 20-25 km long.) Imagine that that is the case for every river in the Russian Far East. Except usually no one is removing the nets.

This was the house I stayed in at the reserve. There are a 10-15 little houses like this just inside the reserve, and many reserve staff live here (about 15 staff of 30ish total). It's almost like a big family. Of course, they must go in to town for groceries, supplies, anything -- here there is nothing but their houses, firewood, and some chickens they keep -- with hills and the zapovednik on all sides. It is literally a little village in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps a quaint idea, but also hard. And there's also a banya here, of course. Baths on Saturdays!

Here is my room in the house. I stayed in the so-called "Aquatic Ecologists' House," because aquatic ecologists from the Institute of Biology and Soil Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences stay here when they conduct research in the reserve. Until fall of 2006 Kedrovaya Pad was part of the Institute of Biology and Soil Sciences. (Now it is independent.) Kedrovaya Pad is one of only 5 zapovedniks in Russia that is not under the Ministry of Natural Resources. Instead it is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Reserve office and library.

Another house and firewood shed.

The little dots on this blue wall are ladybugs. Like my visit to Khingansky Zapovednik will probably always be associated with the caterpillars that crawled all over me and Slava during our first hike, my visit to Kedrovaya Pad will always be associated with ladybugs. They were everywhere! Actually in the days after I took this picture even more appeared. I found it very amusing when one day, sitting in the reserve office reading some scientific literature, I came across a paragraph that began, "Visitors to the reserve in the late fall will be amazed at the number of ladybugs."

Frost on the leaves in the morning. We could feel that fall is almost over here. Although it would warm up by around 11 or noon in the daytime, at night and in the morning it was usually pretty chilly.

Although most trees in Vladivostok still had their leaves in late October, at Kedrovaya Pad they were mostly gone already. Only the brilliant red maples were still in full fall colors. They really stood out.

The staff at the reserve were really wonderful, which seems to be a trend in the zapovednik system. Recently in my research on the Russian nature reserve system I came across a quote that I really liked. Since Kedrovaya Pad was the last reserve I will visit while on the Fulbright, I'll give that quote here, as a summary of sorts:

In view of the recent past it would not be appropriate to propose an extravagant toast to our present 'great and mighty' zapovednik system; yet in it labours a multitude of remarkable people who are enthusiastic about nature protection -- and that is the main thing. (Feliks Shtilmark, A History of Russian Zapovedniks, 1895-1995)

In my experience this could not be more true.

One of the reserve's scientists, Vadim, took me on my first hike in Kedrovaya Pad. We climbed up one hill for a view of the Sea of Japan.

On the hike with Vadim we also saw a great stone birch. Its wood is so heavy it sinks in water; it does not float like almost all (or perhaps all) other trees.

The science director at Kedrovaya Pad, Yuliya, studies bats (among other things that she is even more specialized in). Here I am holding one of her subjects, who is a little lethargic after a very chilly night.

It's hard to photograph bats. Yuliya's husband Denis is quite the photographer, and here is one of his pictures of a bat, for a better view. Kedrovaya Pad is home to 9 species of bats, which is considered not very many. Maybe Yuliya will discover some more.

Yuliya and Denis took me on a good hike to a cabin in the middle of the zapovedik. (It's 7 km away from the little village where the staff all live.) Reserve scientists and rangers sometimes take a break here for tea or even spend the night if on long hikes through the reserve. Here are Yuliya and her and Denis's 8-month-old son, Seva, at the beginning of the hike. Seva is a very cute and happy baby. When he wasn't sleeping on the hike, he talked to us almost nonstop.

Seva and Yuliya are picking barberries (барбарис) to make tea with.

The white on the bottom of this stem is ice! I have no idea how it forms this way. These fragile wisps of ice were on lots of plant stems.

Denis is trying to get a better shot.

Although I didn't see any leopard tracks in the reserve, we saw plenty of signs of bears and tigers. There used to be a beehive in the trunk of this tree, until an Asiatic black bear (гималайский медведь) got hungry.

A tiger made this hole in the leaves -- he pawed the ground here after taking care of some business. We saw a lot of these marks, called poskryoby in Russian. The were at least a foot and a half long.

The scratches (задыры) on this tree trunk were made by an Amur tiger about 3 weeks before I took this picture. I'd estimate they were a little over 2 meters up. Either the tiger was marking his territory, or just expressing his emotions (for real).

More tiger scratches, but these are older. This tree really got laid into. There are no tigers living permanently on the territory of Kedrovaya Pad Zapovednik (it's too small for them -- tigers have big territories), but they do pass through. They compete with leopards for food. If prey is abundant and there are enough deer and wild boar for both cats, they can live together in the same area. If not, the larger tiger will push out the leopard. (Leopards weigh only 30-50 kg, while tigers weigh 100 (females) - 200 (males).) Leopards are also territorial, but the territories they occupy are smaller. Kedrovaya Pad is big enough for one adult male leopard and two adult females, plus cubs.

A tigress and her cubs scratched up this tree at all levels. The white stuff is sap or resin (I forget which).

Very funny. I'm being a tiger.

These scratches are already really old, made by a bear or tiger. Ok, yes, obviously I thought all these scratches were really cool, as you've guessed by the number of pictures.

Denis estimated that this fir tree (пихта) is 600 years old. About 13% of the territory of Kedrovaya Pad is primary forest (mostly spruce and fir forest -- елово-пихтовые леса -- but with Korean pipe and other slow-growing giants too) that has never been logged or destroyed by fire. Even in the very sparsely populated Russian Far East, such areas are very rare.

Pretty view of the Kedrovaya River.

Here's the hut where we took a break for a snack and tea. In the 1970s a local journalist came here with a reserve inspector. She really wanted to see a leopard, so the reserve joked that sure, of course she would see one -- never believing it themselves. After all, there were only about 30-40 leopards in the wild at this time, and leopards are not animals that like to show themselves. But at the hut they in fact did see a leopard! Except that the journalist got so scared she locked herself in the hut and did not come out for hours, even after the leopard was long gone. Oh well.

We also made an interesting trip to a nearby stream, about 1 km long, that flows into the Amur Bay. Chum salmon spawn here in the hundreds in the fall. The stream is protected by a local citizen, Nikolai, who does it just because he thinks it is important. It's all on his own initiative, and he doesn't get paid, of course for being this kind of "public inspector."(And he himself is very poor.) This kind of thing is very rare! Nikolai himself kicks poachers off this territory when salmon return to spawn. His hope someday is to get a permit to do a small volume of local fishing at the mouth of the stream, bringing in a small sum and thus making conservation profitable. Of course, a lot of fairly expensive paperwork is necessary to do this. (There are so many fish here that there is not enough room to for them all to spawn, so some could be harvested without detriment to the population.)

Nikolai is explaining his work and goals to Anatoly.

Anatoly estimates about 200 chum salmon were in this 1 km stream when we were there. We saw plenty of them -- but they get scared when they see people and swim away very fast (so I couldn't get any good pictures).

Grasses, the Amur Bay and the peninsula on which Vladivostok is located in the background. We could see Vladivostok from here. This spot is about 3 km from the Kedrovaya Pad Zapovednik border. (The reserve border is 3 km inland.)

Looking back toward Kedrovaya Pad from near the coast.

Первый снег

2007-10-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

У нас во Владивостоке идет первый снег. Хотя мне казалось, что прекрасная, теплая и солнечная осень никогда не закончится, вот листья только начинали падать... а в четверг очередной циклон уже подкрадывался к нам, температура резко упала, ночью начался дождь, утром поднялся ветер, и к ужину в пятницу наблюдались первые снежинки. Сегодня (в сууботу) утром всё вроде стихло, но после обеда снова пошел снег. Вот вид из моего окна.
Прощай, лето!

New Neighbors, New Doors

2007-10-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

In mid-October I got new neighbors. They bought the apartment next door to me. The biggest effect so far is that we got new doors on our hallway! (Really, those who have lived in a Russian apartment building may understand my excitement at any household improvements.) My hallway has 2 doors leading to our floor's 2 elevators (one working, one eternally out of order) and the stairwell. Apparently the new neighbors were very disappointed with the hallway's appearance generally and the draft situation -- it gets very cold in the winter, as the hallway is not heated, plus there are cracks in the windows, and the doors blocking off the hallway from really cold places like the stairwell don't close well. So, they paid to have new doors put in! They are really spiffy and look super.
This is one of our new doors, leading from the elevator to our hall. It even has a peephole. It isn't squeaky or rusty or anything.

This used to be our door. And this is the door on the other hallway on my floor -- what our door used to look like. Since people almost always own their apartment in Russia, and don't rent, there isn't one person (a landlord) who looks after the building. So that means common areas like hallways, doors and windows in hallways, elevators, stairwells, etc. often aren't in great shape. It is certainly very rare for an individual apartment-owner to pay out of pocket to improve these areas.

Fall continues to be beautiful in Vladivostok! This is a view of the Amur Bay (Pacific Ocean) and the First River area, including where I live, from the hills above.

Conferences, Dinosaurs and a TV Appearance

2007-10-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

From October 1-10 I went to two conferences. The first was the 8th annual Conference on Russian Far East Zapovedniks (nature reserves), held outside of Blagoveschensk in the Amur Region. Presentations aside, the best thing about this conference was that I got another chance to see some of the wonderful people I've met while visiting some zapovedniks in the Far East. It definitely made the 34-hour train ride worth it -- and I say that even considering that the guys in my car spilled beer all over me about halfway through the trip. (Although they tried to make up for it by asking me to marry them, that didn't save my jeans.) This first picture is me after the conference with a number of reserve scientists, from Khingansky Zapovednik (Irina, Tatyana, Marina, Alyosha and Slava), and on the end is Misha from Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik.

The conference was held at a little Soviet-era resort, Mukhinka, and there was a little lake and beautiful forest all around. The fall colors there were just amazing, and walking in the woods here was really delightful. The river in the background of the second picture below is the Zeya, a large tributary of the Amur.

During this conference I also made my first (in Russia or the U.S.) TV appearance! The local news service came out to the conference one day, and since I was the token foreigner, of course they had to interview me. Unfortunately I didn't get a copy of the recording, which is too bad, as I actually have the ability to sound rather intelligent in Russian these days. However, here are pictures of me with the cameraman, and a very blurry picture of me on "Vesti" (the news) on TV, with my name up there and everything (click on picture to enlarge).

Oh, and the Amur Region is also famous for dinosaurs! In the area near the capital, Blagoveschensk, in the 20th century scientists discovered 10 new species of dinosaurs (6 plant-eaters and 4 carnivores). Below is me with a duck-billed plant-eater, Olorotitan arharensis, who lived in the area more than 65 million years ago, but just got dug up and put together in the last 8 years.

The second conference, Sosnovka, was outside of Khabarovsk, about halfway between the first conference and Vladivostok. Every year this conference brings together a number of Russian environmental NGOs, from Moscow to Kamchatka, and I got to see some old friends, meet some new people I'd been long hoping to meet, and even meet some people whose names I'd seen on articles before, but who I never expected to meet in person! It was a really cool experience to get to go and hear discussed a number of issues facing the environmental community, from oil and gas to forestry regulations to mining and hydropower. (Obviously an extractive industries theme running through Russia's development plans, unfortunately.) Sadly I did a very poor photography job at Sosnovka, and the best part was the guitar playing and singing anyway, which you need video for.

This sign reminds vacationers at the Mukhinka resort to "take care of nature!"

Terney, Tiger Day and Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik (Sept 20-27)

2007-10-10T02:28:00.000-07:00

At the end of September I finally made a trip to the largest federal-level nature reserve in the Primorsky Region, Sikhote-Alinsky Zapovednik. Founded in 1935, it is one of the oldest nature reserves in all of Russia, and it is also one of only 8 UNESCO World Heritage nature sites in Russia. Sikhote-Alinsky Zapovednik is best known for the endangered Amur tiger: the reserve is estimated to be home to 30-40 of them. Since 1992 the reserve has been working with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) on a project to radio-collar and track tigers in the zapovednik. Unfortunately my trip was much too short, and I didn't see even any tiger tracks. However, WCS did fit a tigress with a new radio collar just last week, on October 8. Pretty amazing.

The zapovednik's headquarters are located in the little village of Ternei, on the Pacific coast and near the border of the reserve, a 10-hour (minimum) drive north from Vladivostok. I stayed in Ternei at WCS's research center, which was really nice. Ternei is a town of about 4000, and at this time of year, with the wonderful fall weather, it seems something close to paradise. These first two pictures are views of Ternei.

While I was in Ternei 4 scientists from the zapovednik and an American graduate student were doing field work to test a model that should predict the composition of forests in the area. They let me come out to two of their field sites with them, which was great. If the model accurately describes the forests in the zapovednik now -- which is what they're trying to test -- then it may be a good predictor of how forest composition here might change in the future (due to factors such as climate change, etc.). In this picture Nancy is explaining a technique to Lena.

Overall the forests in the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik are very unique -- truly one of a kind today, as similar forests have already been lost (i.e., logged) all around the rest of the world. Here Misha is measuring tree height in a secondary forest.

Sveta is measuring diameter.

We worked in 30-m diameter circular plots (counting trees and species, measuring diameter, height, etc.), and we measured off sectors in each circle using measuring tape.

Misha is measuring diameter, and Galina is recording. Misha, Lena, Galina and Sveta were just wonderful. Much like the science staff at Khingansky Zapovednik, they are quite literally too nice for words. Misha, Galina and Sveta have all been working together at Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik for more than 20 years -- so they are also quite the source of information.

An old cabin at an old ranger station near one of the reserve's research sites. This reminded me of something like Shenandoah. We stoked the stove to make tea.

This is the Pacific Coast in the zapovednik.

More coastline.

There are literally dozens of seals lounging on these rocks. Sveta counted over 200. This part of the ocean is also part of the reserve.

Mmmm...mushrooms. Mushrooms and mushroom-hunting are a very important (and delicious) part of Russian culture, and September is mushroom season out here. But these mushrooms, although edible, were in the zapovednik, so you can't pick them.

I was also lucky to be in Ternei on Tiger Day. This holiday is celebrated throughout the Primorsky Region in September, in a number of different towns and cities. It started in Vladivostok back in 2000. The main and original sponsor is an environmental organization in Vladivostok, although a number of groups are always involved in planning. In Ternei the participants included WCS, Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, a local environmental club, Uragus, local schools in the Ternei District and more. The holiday started inside with a number of performances (dances, skits, etc. -- not all tiger-related), and then there was a parade around town.

At the parade. Each group (club, school, NGO, etc.) had its own banner and its own cheer about tigers.

This is Volodya the Tiger. He's the hero of the day.

One thing about the Far East is that there are amazingly beautiful and pristine areas, like Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, right next to areas of near environmental disaster. This is a mine in the town of Dalnegorsk, not far south of Ternei. The mine is no longer operating, it seems -- or at least ore is not being trucked out of town anymore -- but a whole lot of decaying Soviet-era equipment and crumbling factories have been left behind here, and it's hard to imagine it being cleaned up soon.

Environmental news stand in Terney.

Chickens! This picture is for you, Mom. Well, and for Dad and Dan. There were plenty of chickens on the side of the road in Terney.

Meet me in Saint Petersburg (August 31 - Sept 8)

2007-10-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

This year my very brave parents decided to close their eyes, hold their breath, join hands, hope for the best and make their first trip to Russia. After hearing so much (much more than they ever wanted to know, perhaps) about my travel here for more than 4 years now, they decided to check it out. Although I have yet to convince them to visit Siberia or the Far East, Mom and Dad did come to Saint Petersburg for the first week of September. This first picture is my mom and dad on the Catherine Canal (from Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg's largest -- and quite famous -- downtown thoroughfare.)

Petersburg was the first place I ever visited in Russia; I lived there for a month in July of 2003, but haven't been back since. I still learned plenty of new things for myself this time around. One of the coolest things was my parents' interest in the siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), so this time I learned a lot about the city during the years of WWII, the colossal efforts that must have been taken to restore it since then, and more.

Despite knowing no Russian or the Cyrillic alphabet, my parents did learn to recognize words like "coffee house," "restaurant," and, of course, "McDonalds" (something they wouldn't see in Vladivostok) by the end of the trip. Overall they deserve quite the kudos for trying to learn more about strange and overwhelming country that their daughter is for some reason fascinated by. My dad was even reading War and Peace on the plane ride over! And, after surviving the Petersburg metro several times, hopefully they now feel ready to take on anything.

Also, this blog entry is made possible by the photography skills of my mother. Thank you for being the photographer, Mom!

This is something else I did not do in Petersburg my first time around -- get my picture taken with Peter and Catherine the Great! Peter the Great was tsar of Russia from 1682-1725, and he founded St Petersburg and moved the capital of Russia there (from Moscow) in 1703. The capital stayed in St Petersburg until 1918, when the Bolsheviks moved it back to Moscow. Catherine the Great ruled Russia from 1762-1796. While Peter won Russia a northern port, St Petersburg, on the Baltic, Catherine won the country a southern port, Odessa, on the Black Sea. Ports of course were very important to Russia's development -- it's no fun being land-locked. There are Peter and Catherine the Greats all over St Petersburg and the palaces on the outskirts, just waiting to take their picture with tourists (for a $4 fee).

St Petersburg is a city of palaces. Tsars' palaces, people richer than the tsars' palaces, you name it. Above is St Petersburg's first palace -- inside is preserved the wooden house where Peter the Great lived when the city was being built. Peter didn't really like big stuff. All the palaces he built for himself were pretty little.

And on a more grandiose scale... This is the Winter Palace and Hermitage Museum, picture taken from Palace Square, where Nevsky Prospect ends. The 4 palaces of the Winter Palace (this is just a view of the most famous one) were built in the mid-1700s. The Winter Palace was the winter residence of the tsars. Obviously, they gave themselves a little upgrade over Peter's modest digs. Today you can go inside the Winter Palace, but you can't see what the tsars' rooms looked like -- the Bolsheviks weren't really too big on preserving that stuff. Instead you can tour the Hermitage, one of the world's largest art museums. The collection was started by Catherine the Great, and initially was a private collection of the tsars. Today the Hermitage has over 3 million pieces of art -- you could literally spend a lifetime there -- including 2 Leonardo da Vincis, Raphaels, many Rembrandts, etc. The interiors of the Hermitage alone are quite unreal and extravagant. Perhaps my mom will post a picture of them in the comments section :-).

This is the Aleksandr Column, in Palace Square in front of the Hermitage/Winter Palace. It commemorates Russia's victory over Napoleon in 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars. (Aleksandr I was tsar at the time.) At the top an angel is crushing a snake with her cross. (You guessed it -- Napoleon is the snake.) This column has no foundation and rests on its own weight.

Here's another snake-crushing monument. (The dudes in front are part of one of numerous wedding parties.) This is a monument to Peter the Great called the Bronze Horseman, since made very famous in a poem of the same name by Russia's greatest writer, Aleksandr Pushkin. As my dad astutely observed, the back hoof of the horse is also crushing a snake. However, this snake is not Napoleon but the Swedish king Charles XII, whom Peter defeated in the Great Northern War to win the territory that includes St Petersburg.

In the summer the tsars got away from their drab living in St Petersburg and the Winter Palace and went out to the suburbs. This is me and my mom in front of part of the main fountain cascade at Peterhof, the construction of which was started by Peter the Great in the early 1700s. Peterhof is on the Gulf of Finland, 20 km from St Petersburg. Peter may have abandoned his modest principles *just a little* when he went to build this palace and particularly the beautiful grounds, meant to rival Versailles. There is quite a lot of gold and many amazing fountains here, and it is difficult to imagine a place being more extravagant, although I suppose we'll just have to go to Versailles to compare. Like all the tsars' suburban palaces, Peterhof was occupied by the Germans in WWII, and much of the grounds and palace interiors were destroyed by them. From here the German army used to fire on St Petersburg, aiming for the huge gold dome of St Isaac's Cathedral downtown.

This is the main palace, or Catherine Palace, at Tsarskoye Selo. (The weather wasn't as super for our visit there -- St Petersburg can already be pretty chilly, windy and rainy at the beginning of September. Fortunately we had sunny -- if cool -- weather about half the time.) Peter the Great gave the land here to his wife, Catherine I, as a present in the early 1700s. Most of the building was overseen by their daughter, Elizabeth (her architect was Rastrelli, responsible for much of the baroque architecture of St Petersburg), and then Catherine the Great. Both Tsarskoye Selo and Peterhof are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

St Petersburg was home to come of Russia's greatest literary and artistic geniuses. This is Dostoevsky's tombstone.

This building is home to the House of Books (Dom Knigi) on Nevsky Prospect. It just looks cool. It was originally built to house an American sewing-machine company, which I suppose could serve as a partial explanation of the architecture.

This is the Church on the Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Aleksandr II was assassinated in 1881. Fortunately this church was not destroyed by the Communists, although it was closed and used to house theater props, among other things. It took longer to restore it (25+ years) than it did to build it. The inside walls are covered in very ornate mosaics. Along with Kazan Cathedral and St Isaac's Cathedral, this is one of the most famous churches in St Petersburg -- and they are all right downtown, literally within minutes' walk of each other.

This bear is helping us toast our trip. You have to indulge in the Russian stereotypes sometime. The vodka was in fact really good.

The Venice of the North? Many people claim that St Petersburg deserves this title.

We also took a trip to Novgorod for the day, climbed St Isaac's Cathedral, wandered around the Peter and Paul Fortress in the rain, visited the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, where many of the estimated 1 million victims of the siege of Leningrad are buried in mass graves, and much more. Perhaps Mom will post some more pictures.

Travels in the Altai-Sayan Region (August 15 - 30, 2006)

2007-09-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

From August 15-30 my friend Anya and I traveled in the Altai-Sayan Region of south-central Siberia (see map right) , which is home to some of Russia's most beautiful, striking and varied landscapes.
Anya is from Irkutsk, and we met during my first trip to Russia over 4 years ago. During our trip we visited Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve on the Enisei River (one of the largest rivers in Siberia and on Earth, running from south to north to the Arctic Ocean); the Republic of Khakasiya and Khakassky Zapovednik (nature reserve); we traveled along the border of Khakasiya, the Altai Republic and the Republic of Tuva (home to nomads, throat singing, camels and yaks), through Tuva and to the park Ergaki in the Krasnoyarsk Region. We had an amazing time!!

We are very, very grateful to the directors of Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve and Ergaki Park, and also the director of the Idgir hunting and fishing company for inviting us to visit and taking time out of their incredibly busy schedules to organize everything for us. They are wonderful. We also owe a big thank you to the staff of Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve and Ergaki Park for teaching us about the protected natural territories where they work. Lots of pictures below!

Lenin Exiled Here: Town of Shushenskoye (August 16)

2007-09-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

Anya and I spent our first day in the town of Shushenskoye, a town of 20,000, where the offices for Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve are located. The next day we headed out to the reserve.
City government building in Shushenskoye.

Church in Shushenskoye.

Shushenskoye's claim to fame is that Lenin was exiled here for 3 years, from 1897-1900, during the reign of Russia's last tsar, Nikolai II. We took a tour of the Shushenskoye ethnographic museum, which was basically a Lenin tour, with some other houses from the time period thrown in. Above I am standing in front of the house Lenin, "the leader the the world's proletariat", lived in from 1897-98.

This guy is showing us how they used to make those classic Russian wooden spoons in villages in Siberia. (At the ethnographic museum.)

It didn't sound like Lenin had it too rough in exile. Actually, kind of sounded like a well-paid vacation to Siberia. Lenin liked to head out of Shushenskoye and go hunting about 20 km out of town, in the territory that is now part of Shushensky Bor National Park. Here Anya and I are standing in front of the hut where Lenin would take a break during his hunting capades.

The sign says "Hut. Lenin liked to relax here while hunting."

We are totally relaxing to the fullest!

A little change of pace: this is the river-boat station on the Enisei River in the town of Shushenskoye. In a totally cool project - the brain child of the director of Sayano-Shushensky Reserve - the reserve bought up this building in 2000, when it was in a total state of disrepair (i.e., no glass in the windows, etc.). The reserve invested its own money to restore the building and turn it into a gym/nature exhibit in one. Now residents of the town of Shushenskoye can go workout here, so the reserve has taken on a societal role in keeping people healthy, and the fees the gym-goers pay go toward the reserve's budget. There are information signs about all the reserves of the Altai-Sayan region here, plus many professional photographs, info about other reserves, etc. So instead of watching talk TV while working out, people can watch and read about the amazing natural places in their own backyard. A pretty unique idea. The station also houses a conference room equipped with a projector and all, as well as the offices for the Association of Zapovedniks and National Parks of the Altai-Sayan Region.
We had a great place to stay in Shushenskoye - in the Sayano-Shushensky Reserve's little hotel lodge. Here's a picture from the outside. We were very well taken care of.

Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve (Aug 17-20)

2007-09-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

Anya and I spent our first weekend on the edge of Sayano-Shushensky Biosphere Reserve, a huge territory with an area of almost 400,000 hectares. The reserve is a strict protected area and therefore no tourists are allowed into the reserve territory. The enormous Enisei River makes up the eastern border of the reserve and is also the reserve's buffer zone. All boats in the section of the river bordering the reserve have to have special permission from the reserve and have to register on site. We lived on the other side of the river, in the so-called "biosphere polygon." Under UNESCO biosphere reserves should have a strictly protected territory, that is the reserve itself, and a "polygon" where limited natural resource use is allowed with the goal of demonstrating sustainable economic development. Hunting and fishing tourism are the main activities in Sayano-Shushensky's polygon. In the first picture is the Enisei River; the reserve is on the right side, and the polygon is on the left side.

Here is a picture of Anya and the little boat we took almost 200 km (a 4-5 hour trip) down the Enisei River to the ranger station where we stayed. Anya is feeding this dog sunflower seeds, and he could actually shell and eat them.

Sayano-Shushensky Reserve was created in 1976 partially to offset and study the effects of the construction of Sayano-Shushensky Hydroelectric Dam on the Enisei River. This is why the river, much like the Columbia, doesn't look like a wild river with rapids, etc., but rather like a large peaceful sea.

Russians claim Sayano-Shushensky Dam is the largest on earth, which I haven't been able to confirm. However, it is huge. (It is the largest hydroelectric station in Russia.) When it was built the water level on the Enisei River behind the dam rose 240 meters up the sides of the mountains along the river!

These mountain sides were forested, and unfortunately they were not logged before the dam began to operate and the water level rose. Not only were millions of dollars of valuable timber lost, but dead logs still float on the reservoir nearly 25 years after the completion of the dam. The decaying logs pollute the river and make the water not so clear underwater, too. (I checked it out when I went swimming in the reservoir.) They say the logs that have sunk actually haven't reached the bottom of the river, either, but rather are floating as a huge underwater forest about 40 meters below the surface.

Logs still floating on the surface of the Enisei. Makes for interesting navigation for water craft.

Huge letters on the mountain side saying "Sayano-Shushensky Reserve." You can't miss that!

We stayed at the reserve's nicest ranger station, which was really, REALLY nice. Like a fancy ski lodge in the U.S. Here are me and Anya next to the fireplace.

This is a view from the ranger station in the evening.

Here is a view of the house we stayed in from the outside. Swimming was pretty chilly but still fun.

This is Valery, our super guide during our time in the reserve. There are just not enough positive adjectives to describe him. On our first day he took us on a hike over the cliffs near where we stayed, totally redefining the definition of "trail." Here he is probably waiting for us to hurry up and stop taking pictures of the great views we saw.

Anya and I became quite the rock climbers.

Valery also took us to search for the wild mountain goats that inhabit the steep slopes of the reserve. Amazingly, he could spot them with no trouble, even though they were hard for us to find even using binoculars! In hot weather the goats will come down close to the water level, but since it was chilly and misty when we went looking for them, we only saw them from far away. Which was still really cool!

Some cool pictures with reflections in the water. If you closely look at the bottom of the slopes you can see a little grey-brown edge right at the water level. That is the start of the "dead zone," where annually rising water levels from the dam don't allow anything to grow. In the spring, when the water is at its lowest level, this zone is 40 meters wide and very easy to see. Now it is only about 2 meters wide.

Me sitting in the rocky and dead-woody dead zone on the shore of the mighty Enisei.

Lakes, Steppe and Siberian Stonehenge: Khakasiya (Aug 21-23)

2007-09-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

After Anya and I got back from Sayano-Shushensky Reserve we did a little loop -- or more like a triangle -- through the Altai-Sayan Region. (By "little" I mean 1000 km round-trip; we took a week to do it.) The northwest side of the triangle was in the Republic of Khakasiya, and we started at the northern tip and drove southwest toward the Altai Republic and Republic of Tuva. Northern Khakasiya has a lot of steppe and low rolling hills -- it seems the sky could just stretch on there forever.

We stopped for one night at Lake Itkhul' in Khakassky Nature Reserve (Zapovednik). (Sunset)

Khakasiya is home to lakes of all kinds. A few are protected in Khakassky Nature Reserve, and a few are open to tourists. Unfortunately we did not have the best weather for our lake touring day. Above Anya is climbing a steep hill for a windy and rainy lookout over Lake Belyo in Khakassky Reserve.

The soil on the climb up was very red (my socks changed color), as was this rock. On top is Ilya, our "guide" (I use that term pretty loosely) for our week-long tour.

Hanging out on another lake shore. Lake Tus is a lake with high mineral content that is a popular tourist destination in July. Unfortunately by August it is not really sunbathing weather there anymore. Although neither the chilly temperatures nor the "no swimming" signs stopped Ilya from taking a dip.

This was a nickel mine during the Soviet Union. However in the early 1970s part of the mine collapsed, killing the workers there, and they closed it. Now lots of tourists can come check it out for 20 rubles a head. The amazing thing is they dug this mine without any explosives or anything like that -- basically with hand equipment. Apparently they used to have bungee jumping here, too (after the mine's collapse, that is), which sounds like it was a disaster waiting to happen -- you can't go anymore.

These huge rocks are from a burial site from the 3rd century BC. They are huge (see picture below with me in it for some perspective). Ancient peoples probably dragged these rocks from at least 45 km away to this site, which is pretty unbelievable. The rocks made up the outer edge of a huge, circular burial mound that was covered in earth and hollow inside -- you could think of the rocks as the outer ring-support structure. Inside would be buried some famous ancient person (warrior, etc.) along with his family (if necessary they'd kill the wife so she could be buried with her husband), his property, etc.

Here's me next to a couple of these rocks. This burial mound was 0.5 km in length and 11.5 m high! Archeologists suddenly became interested in excavating it in the 1950s, when a local resident accidentally found gold here. Total they found 277 kg of gold in this burial mound -- so the warrior here must have been quite the VIP.

This mound in the foreground is what an unexcavated burial mound looks like. We saw hundreds of these throughout Khakasiya. Ancient peoples would build them on the steppe so that they would be visible from a distance. (That's why they had to drag those rocks from so far away -- no big rocks on the steppe, but you can't be building your burial sites on some river bank -- no one will see them there.)

This cow is chilling at a gas station in southwest Khakasiya. Cows were all over the place. And if they are crossing the road they definitely have the right of way.

11% of the population of Khakasiya is native peoples, and they have their own language. We saw signs in Khakasiya and especially in Tuva in the native language. (Tuva is 77% indigenous people.) Here is the first one of those signs -- the last 3 words are not Russian. Actually I'm not even too clear on what the Russian here is supposed to mean. Literally it appears to say "Wish the people a land of happiness!" but maybe it is supposed to mean "wish the people land and happiness"? Either way it seems nice.

Southwest Khakasiya is already close to the Altai Republic and is quite mountainous and forested. The roads through the mountains kind of reminded me of the Cascades in Oregon. When we camped out in the mountains in this tent Anya and I learned that late August is NOT summer in the Altai-Sayan Region. It got down to a damp and chilly 35 degrees F, at which point we decided to sleep in the van.

Here we are already approaching the border with Tuva. The landscape is already certainly quite different than the flat steppe at the beginning of our trip!

Camels, Yaks and Yurts: Tuva! (Aug 24-25)

2007-09-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Not many people would think of camels and yaks when they think of Russia, but in Russia's Republic of Tuva you can see them. Not that we did.

But anyway Tuva is one of the most mystical places in Russia, a land of nomads, throat singers, shamanism, and more.

Tuva is on the border with Mongolia. From Khakasiya we headed south and drove across Tuva from its western edge, on the border with Altai, to east. The landscape there was awesome. I have never seen any place like it. Tuva is home to the highest mountain in Siberia and also real, untouched steppe. There are only 300,000 people here, in an area as big as the state of Washington. Here is the sign on the border between Tuva and Khakasiya. Even though it is only a little more than 7000 feet up, at this pass it feels like you are on the top of the world.

Looking back toward Khakasiya from Tuva. The red color of the grass is a sign that it is already fall.

Me next to an Oba. People will start to build these in high places. You should add a rock on top if you wish to have good fortunes.

Yurts in the foothills. Yurts were the traditional housing for nomadic Tuvan cattle herders. They can have from 8 to 16 wooden walls and are covered with a thick cloth. They are the ideal nomads' residence -- they can be assembled and dissembled in just an hour! In the early 1950s the Tuvan people officially became "settled," that is, no longer nomadic, but a small percent of Tuvans today still lead the traditional nomadic lifestyle that they had led for over 2000 years. Another nomadic Tuvan dwelling resembles an American Indian's teepee, and was traditionally used by reindeer herders.

Amazing scenic lookout. It looked like another planet. Tuva has been a part of Russia since 1944. Before then it had quite the mixed history and was settled by by European, Turkish, Mongolian and Chinese tribes, and was part of the Mongolian and Chinese empires. The Tuvan language is a Turkish language, and they also adopted the traditional nomadic lifestyle (including the yurt) from the Turks over 2000 years ago. Today 77% of the population of Tuva is native, and 22% is Russian. Tuvans actually call Tuva "Tyva," which is the official name for the republic, but Russians say "Tuva" because "Tyva" is hard for them to say.

Me and Anya at the amazing scenic lookout.

This picture pretty much sums up our guide, Ilya.

Big sign heading into the town of Ak-Dovurak, home to a big asbetos mine. Big signs were popular in Tuva.

Here's another big road sign in Tuva, wishing you a safe journey.

Steppe and mountains. The scenery really was awesome.

More scenery.

Cow crossing. Single-file. They're very well organized.

Sacred mountain in Tuva. The Dalai Lama visited here in 1993. Both Buddhism and Shamanism are accepted religions in Tuva. Tuva is considered one of the birthplaces of Shamanism and is home to perhaps the most famous shaman living today, who is considered an authority for the religion.

Tuvans believe that Genghis Khan is buried in this little mountain/hill in the foreground. German archeologists actually wanted to excavate the hill and have a look, but the Tuvans wouldn't let them.

More scenery. Even though fall is starting in Tuva, it was still about 75 degrees out. In the summer here temperatures easily top 100, while in the winter it can hit 50 below.

This is the headwaters of the Enisei River. Only here is the Enisei still natural, and it still looks like it has for centuries, because here the river is free of dams. The rest of the river north to the Arctic is home to nearly a dozen very large dams. The Enisei forms at the confluence of the Small and Large Enisei rivers, and at their confluence also stands the city of Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva. Kyzyl was founded in 1914 and means "red" in the Tuvan language. It is home to only 109,000 people. The oldest city in Tuva was founded in 1886. (After all, Tuvans were nomadic.)

Buddhist temple in Kyzyl. After my visit to China I didn't find it very impressive inside, though.

We went to the Beaver Springs outside of Kyzyl. These springs were discovered in the 4th century, which means people have been coming here for over 1500 years. It is believed that people who wash in these springs will be healthy and strong, and that they will not harm nature (neither kill animals nor pick a single flower). Beavers would also come here in the winter. Now there are some signs of modernity here: there are a number of different springs and for each one a post-it note indicates what diseases the waters will help protect you from. This spring above one is helpful against headaches. We saw a few people come and fill up their water bottles here too. The water tastes really good.

Kyzyl is the geographic center of Asia! Wow! So now I have been there, too. Pretty cool.

Good-bye, Tuva. This is the sign on the border with the Krasnoyarsk Region.

Ergaki: Artists' Pass and a Stone City (Aug 26-27)

2007-09-05T23:14:00.000-07:00

From Tuva we traveled to Ergaki Park in the Krasnoyarsk Region, where we spent had gorgeous weather for two great days of hiking and interacting with the park's staff. Ergaki is located in the Sayan Mountains, named for an ancient tribe that lived in the area, the Sayans. The word "ergaki" means "fingers" and refers to the way the cliffs in the area stick up out of the mountains. The park is pretty popular and gets about 80,000 tourists (mostly hikers and skiers) each year.

This first photo above is of the "Sleeping Sayan." If you look at this mountain cliff right you will see the Sayan's face in profile on the left side, then his arms crossed over his chest and then his feet on the right side; he is lying down as if looking toward the sky. As you might imagine, there are many legends about the Sayan people at Ergaki. The Sleeping Sayan is the guardian and protector of nature in these parts.

A rainbow followed us into Ergaki -- a sign of great weather to come!

We stayed on the second floor of this visitors' center.

Sign on the road advertising the Ergaki visitors' center and park, amenities. Although in the U.S. we think of such signs as standard, it is very rare to see them for parks in Russia. (And it certainly makes a nice impression when you do.)

Artists' Pass Hike
This picture above is the Artists' Pass (перевал художников). On our first day in Ergaki we hiked to here -- a combination of hiking and rock climbing. The weather and the views were spectacular. It is about a 20 km hike round-trip, and unfortunately the first third of the trail was rather wet and muddy, so we did this hike in rubber boots. This makes for very sore feet at the end of the day!

Me and Anya at the beginning of the Artists' Pass hike.

Views and scenery at the beginning of the Artists' Pass trail. You can tell by the colors that it's fall already at the end of August.

Wild blueberry picking. There were lots of them and they were yummy!

This cliff in the background is called the "Nut." It is actually quite far away in this picture, and people scale all the way up to the top of it (with climbing equipment, of course). Ergaki is very popular with climbers and there are some very challenging peaks.

We arrived at Buibinskoye Lake. From here we hiked uphill to the left of the lake and then right along the ridge of the cliff you see in the background behind the lake.

Here I am standing under the Hanging Rock, a famous spot in Ergaki, of course.

Hanging Rock from a little farther away.

Rainbow Lake, looking down from the cliff near the Hanging Rock.

A view of the cliff, the hanging rock (right side) and the mountains beyond.

Another view.

Tatyana is wondering when we will stop taking pictures of views.

Not yet! Mountain lakes.

We were lucky to be hiking with two boys who helped us when it really did become rather impossible scaling the rocks over the ridges. (Of course, if it weren't for the boys we would not have chosen such a crazy route with no climbing gear in the first place, but I suppose that's already not the point.) Here Ilya is going to catch Anya when she jumps down from this rock.

Anya is doubting whether this was a good idea.

Scaling the mountainside.

The trail reappears.

Cool cliffs near the Artists' Pass.

Another view from near the Artists' Pass.

Me with Buibinskoye Lake below and mountains in the background. We were 1800 meters up.

More cool rocks.

Another view of Buinbinskoye Lake from above. Anya actually went swimming in this frigid pool! The water temperature was probably only about 50 degrees F. Oh Siberians.

On our way back from the Artists' Pass we passed this miniature rock city that some tourists must have built before us. (It kind of reminded me of the rock sculptures in the river at Zion National Park.) This was pretty cool but nothing compared to the natural stone city we saw on our next day's hike.

Stone City

On our second day in Ergaki we scrambled over rocks in the "Stone City." There are amazing rock columns here, and, of course, many legends, as the scientific explanation for how these huge rock pilesgot here is not completely satisfying.

The legends tell about a stone city built by the ancient Sayan peoples who lived in this area. In this first picture the huge rocks sticking out of the mountainside almost look like they form the wall of a giant's fortress built along a mountain ridge.

This is the first big rock formation you come to in the stone city -- the lookout tower (сторожевая башня).

Me and Anya in front of the lookout tower.

These are the three warriors protecting their stone city.

Me and Anya.

Fall colors.

More huge stacks of rocks.

This is the horse or knight of one of the Sayan princes, in profile. His nose is touching the neighboring rock to the left.

More rocks.

At the end of the trail (we only went about 6 km round-trip today) we decided to climb some rocks. We ended getting up very high. Here is our group up top from below. I have no idea now how we got up there. Apparently we weren't looking down.

And here I am from the top of those rocks. What an amazing trip!

Lazovsky Zapovednik, Petrov Island (July 30 – August 8, 2007)

2007-08-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

From July 30 to August 8 I had the amazing opportunity to live at Lazovsky Zapovednik (i.e., lazovsky nature reserve)’s Petrov Island ranger station in order to learn about how the reserve conducts environmental education work with summer visitors, and to help out at and learn about an environmental education camp for kids that the reserve hosts every year (Aug 6-8) . The ranger station is located across the bay from Petrov Island. (The bay is called Petrov Bay; Petrov Island is all of 700 m from the shore.) Petrov Island is one of two islands that are protected in Lazovsky Zapovednik. (The other protected island, Beltsov Island, is just a few dozens meters from Petrov Island.) Petrov Island is a fascinating place both ecologically (here there is still untouched forest – this is what the taiga forests in the Russian Far East once looked like) and archeologically (ancient peoples lived on the island from 6000 BC to about 1200 AD.) Moreover, Petrov Island is a truly legendary place, almost mythical in meaning(like Lake Baikal) for the zapovednik staff and for many people who have visited there – when you are on the island, you feel like you are in another world. It is a very special feeling, a connection with nature that you can’t quite put into words.
The first picture (above) is Petrov Island from the ranger station.

Above is a picture of nearby Beltsov Island.

In the summer the environmental education department of Lazovsky Zapovednik gives two-hour tours of Petrov Island on an environmental trail. Only 3000 visitors are allowed on the island each year, in order that the ecosystems of the island are not permanently harmed. Lazovsky also takes tourists on a hike from the Petrov Island ranger station to a nearby bay, Peschanaya Bay (“Sandy Bay” in translation), or Peschanka.

This year 2 staff from the environmental education department, Sveta and Olya, as well as one of the reserve’s rangers, Nadya, are working as tour guides on Petrov Island and for the Peschanaya Bay hike. I was very lucky to get to go on tours of Petrov Island with all three of them – they all have a different style, but they are all incredibly professional. (See more about Petrov Island in separate post.) At the ranger station there are also always (year-round) 2 reserve rangers, plus in the summer the head of the environmental education department, Galina Aleksandrovna, and two cooks, who cook for visitors, also live there. There are 5 4-person cabins at the ranger station that visitors can reserve in the summer (they are all booked usually more than 6 months in advance), and there are also a few places where the reserve allows a limited number of visitors to pitch tents. Above is a picture of the cabins and kitchen/dining area at the ranger station. This is the only spot in Lazovsky Zapovednik that has former facilities for visitors. Zapovedniks are not for tourists – Russia has national parks for that.

Here is a picture of some of the staff at the Petrov Island ranger station: Denis (driver; also in charge of the banya (Russian bath and sauna)), Olya (environmental education specialist), Olya (cook), Tyoma (part-time student hire for the summer – chops wood and delivers water and wood to visitors in cabins), Galina Aleksandrovna, Nadya (cook), Nadya (ranger), Katya (Nadya the cook’s daughter).

Above are two pictures of the main house at the ranger station. I lived in this house together with Olya, Olya, Denis, Nadya and Sveta. The flag flying in the front is the Lazovsky Zapovednik flag – pretty cool that the reserve has its own flag.

While I was at the ranger station it rained a lot. We had sunny weather only 3 days – but when it was sunny, it was beautiful. I had an amazing trip despite the rain. I have had a chance to really get to know the staff at Lazovsky, and we had a good time together. I hope that they will remain a part of my life in the future. In the picture above Nadya and I are making pirozhki (filled pastries – with meat, cabbage, fruit – you name it) on a rainy day. The zapovednik sells these pirozhki to visitors.

On the warm sunny days the zapovednik staff put up a tent to hang out under.

Here Dima, the deputy director of Lazovsky Zapovednik, is making shashliki (like Russian shish-kebabs) and talking with Olya. Dima came out to the ranger station to relax for one night – but his cell phone still rang constantly with calls from the reserve’s main office! In general everyone at the ranger station is very, very busy. They do not have weekends in the summer, of course – in fact on Saturdays and Sundays they have the most visitors. If the weather is good, they will give tours all day long. The reserve’s main office is also very busy – when I arrived to the office at 11 pm on a Sunday night, the reserve director opened the door for me – he was at work!

Not only do Nadya and Olya work as tour guides, but they also do all the various housework at the ranger station. This means washing the sheets when visitors leave the cabins, cleaning the cabins, cleaning the toilets, etc. It was amazing to me that two specialists (Olya – education; Nadya – environmental law/inspection) also do all of this work. It is a lot of work! They let me help them out some when I was there. Here are some sheets drying in the breeze in front of the banya, and Olya and Nadya taking a break.

This is a view of the coast looking south toward Peschanaya Bay, and the sign informs visitors that the reserve starts here and it is against the law to cross the reserve boundary. It is impossible to miss this sign. Nonetheless, in the 10 days I was there 4 visitors crossed this boundary and started wandering up the coast! Nadya caught them all before they traveled too far. According to the law, they will have to pay about a $40 fine, although it is possible the reserve director will waive the fee after he has a meeting with them.

I saw a LOT of cormorants on Petrov Bay and Peschanaya Bay. Here one cormorant is drying his wings after a swim. (Cormorants always have to dry their wings.)

Here are some sandpipers.

This is the bay next to Petrov Bay, just north. This area is no longer territory of the zapovednik. Here there is a regular tourist site, called Olenevod, with a number of cabins for tourists. Here the number of visitors is not limited. (It is very strictly limited at the reserve’s Petrov ranger station.) Tourists from Olenevod frequently come over to the Petrov ranger station to ask if they can take a tour of Petrov Island, and if they can get a group together, then the zapovednik will usually give them a tour. A tour of Petrov Island costs about $12/person, and as a rule no more than 10 people are allowed in a group, so that they can hear everything the tour guide is saying and so that the tour guide can be sure not to lose anyone, that all members of the group are following the rules (not going off the trail and trampling plants, etc.).

This is a picture of some seaweed that has washed up on the coast. In Russian it is called “morskaya kapusta” (sea kale or sea cabbage), and it is very popular in salads. They harvest it when it is still green, though – not when it is this color!

Below are some more pretty pictures of Petrov and Beltsov Islands and the coast.

This was my third trip to the Lazo District and its capital, Lazo (the zapovednik office is in Lazo; I came to the Lazo District also in April and May), and all of my trips have been connected with Lazovsky Zapovednik. I love it there. I’ve met a lot of great people in Lazo, and I am amazed how many people at the zapovednik know me and know my name – even though I don’t know all of them that well, and sometimes it takes me a second to remember their names. When I get on the bus to leave Vladivostok for Lazo, even though I know I have a bumpy, spine-jarring 5 ½ hour ride ahead of me, I get this really happy feeling inside. I can’t help smiling, and if almost feels like I am going to a second home away from home.

You can read on for more about my time in the reserve this July and August.

Petrov Island

2007-08-12T05:59:00.000-07:00

I had read a lot about Lazovsky Zapovednik and Petrov Island before coming on this trip. Due to the weather I had to wait 5 days for my first trip to Petrov Island, until August 4. Because of all the reading I’d already done I was waiting with great anticipation to set foot on an island that has occupied so many imaginations. I had high expectations! And when I finally got to go, my expectations were more than exceeded. Petrov Island is an amazing place, where you really can feel nature. It seems like a completely different world.

Petrov Island is exceptional from the ecological standpoint (here there is virgin forest that has never been logged, and there are 396 species of plants on this tiny 36 hectare piece of land) and from the archeological standpoint (5 different cultures lived here between 6000 BC and 1200 AD). However, more than that, this is a place that, it seems, cannot be completely explained by science, and legends and fairy tales about the island abound. If you are there, you begin to believe them – you want to believe them – and for you they become a part of the island and how you imagine it. As one archeologist who I met on this trip told me, “People create fairy tales about the places that they treasure” («Люди наделывают сказки местам, которыми они дорожат».)

In the pictures above are the sign for Petrov Island, noting that this is a nature reserve and unsupervised visitation is not allowed, and there a group of tourists waiting on shore to go to the island. Below a group of tourists is arriving to the island. I went with these tourists on my first tour of Petrov Island, with Olya as our tour guide. What with the foggy weather and all my anticipation of visiting here, along with Olya as a guide (Olya tells many fairy tales about the island very well), on my first trip Petrov Island truly seemed mystical and other-worldly to me.

I later went to Petrov Island with Nadya in clearer weather (Nadya’s tour reminded me of how a Forest Service or National Park Service ranger would give a good tour), and then with Sveta during the kids’ camp. Olya, Nadya and Sveta are all very impressive tour guides, and below is what I learned about Petrov Island from all of them.

This picture is at the entrance to the yew tree grove, what Petrov Island is most famous for. When you start the tour your guide has everyone stand single file, close their eyes, put their hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them and bend down. Then the guide leads everyone into the yew tree grove and tells them they can open their eyes now. They do this especially to sharpen your impressions, and it works. You feel like you are in another world when you enter this yew tree grove. The air is different. (On a warm day, it is also much cooler.) You feel like there is a completely different energy.

There are 8 total species of yew trees, and the species found in the Russian Far East is the Japanese yew tree (тис остроконечный). It is also known as the “red tree” due to its very red wood, as you can see in the picture above. (This tree branch was broken in a storm.)

Yew tree wood is not only red but also very durable; it doesn’t rot. Above is a yew tree that is completely hollow inside (you can test it by dropping a pinecone in one of the holes at the top – it will come out at the bottom) – but is still alive. Yew trees used to be very common in the forests of Primorye and the Russian Far East, but now you can only find individual trees here and there, and yew trees are officially listed as a rare species. There are only 10 such “groves” of yew trees left in Primorye like the grove on Petrov Island. The yew tree grove here is the only such grove found on an island. Yew trees are also found in Japan and Korea. There used to be a lot of them in China, too, but now there are hardly any because the Chinese used to bury people in coffins made of yew tree wood. Moreover, they followed the Russian nested doll principle: richer Chinese would order as many coffins of yew tree wood as they could, and they would be buried inside multiple coffins, one inside the other.

Yew trees have quite the crowns, and their tops let through very little light. That’s the reason there is almost no undergrowth in Petrov Island’s yew tree grove. Yew trees love the shade, but they need plenty of moisture. The way the trees’ branches grow together in the island’s yew tree grove is also really something. The shapes are amazing. Yew trees are the only coniferous trees that don’t have resin in their wood or bark. Yew trees are also poisonous: everything (bark, wood, needles) except their berries contains a weak poison.

Yew trees grow very slowly, and a 30-year-old tree will only be about 3-4 feet high. Yew trees only bear fruit after about 100 years! The yew trees in the grove on Petrov Island are about 800 years old, and the largest yew tree on the island is about 55 feet high with a diameter of about 20 inches. In fact, the yew tree grove on Petrov Island starting growing at about the same time people stopped living the island. When ancient peoples lived on the island from 6000 BC – 1200 AD, there was probably very little vegetation here. And although the trees growing in the yew tree grove seem to grow in rows, as if people had planted them, that is not the case.

In fact the yew trees starting growing up around the remains of the dwellings of ancient peoples. Archeologists have found the remains of 23 dwellings in the yew tree grove, and a total of 100 dwellings on the whole island. In the picture above it looks like someone placed stones around this yew tree. In fact those stones are the remains of an ancient house! Archeologists think that the seeds for the tree fell into an ancient chimney that had since collapsed, and the tree is growing out of that chimney. Moreover, the trail that visitors walk along through the yew tree grove was not created by cutting down trees and clearing a path – it already existed. It’s possible that the trail was actually an ancient street from when people used to live here hundreds of years ago.

This picture is not a bunch of rocks; it is the remains of the wall of an ancient fortress. The wall doesn’t go all the way around the island, but rather just at the lower elevations on the northern end, since the island’s sharp, high rocky slopes (cliffs, really) provide protection on all other sides. The highest point on Petrov Island is 113.7 meters.

Back to ancient cultures: a total of 5 cultures lived on Petrov Island (неолит, янковская культура, кроуновская, бохайское государство, империя чжурчжений). The main part of the populace would have lived on shore, but if there were about 100 dwellings on the island, then about 400 people could have lived here. They were probably the political and religious elite – the elect. They could walk from the mainland to the island across a sandbar. The place where this sandbar was is pictured above – now you can just see some rocks and waves here. But as little as 100 years ago people could cross to the island over this sandbar, getting wet only up to their knees.

The yew tree grove is home to other trees besides just yews. Here is a linden tree with huge knobs on it. The knobs are a sign of some kind of disease, and on the mainland a tree with these kinds of knobs would certainly not live long. Yet this linden continues to grow on Petrov Island, and nobody really knows why. There are theories that perhaps the yew trees play a role, and there is an idea that yew trees and linden trees complement each other, like yin and yang, and that linden trees have a female energy, while yew trees are male. Whether or not you accept this, yew trees and linden trees grow next to each other everywhere on Petrov Island, and sometimes it even seems that they are embracing, or that they make an extra effort to be near each other. Scientists can’t explain why this is, because linden trees and yew trees do not grow next to each other on the mainland.

Here is another yew tree and linden tree all wrapped up in each other in the yew tree grove.

One of the lindens in this picture has a yew tree right next to her, but the other linden bent over and grew horizontally all the way across the path to be next to a yew.

This is a 5-trunked linden tree at the end of the yew tree grove. There is another 5-trunked linden at the end of the tour of Petrov Island – as if one linden tree is welcoming guests at the tour’s start, and the other is waving goodbye.

This is the most interesting composition of lindens and a yew tree next to each other on Petrov Island. Here the yew seems to be supporting the linden on its strongest branch (left side of the picture). In fact the two trees have actually grown together – have fused – in this spot. Two different trees truly growing together is rare anyway, but this is almost unheard of – a yew tree is a conifer, and lindens are deciduous.

(Another view of the same linden and yew – from this angle it seems like they are dancing!) Of course, there are fairy tales to explain why the linden and yew have grown together this way here. According to one legend, an ancient warrior was returning back to Petrov Island, fighting his way back against enemy troops. His mother was waiting for him on the island. From the island she could already see him fighting his way back, but she realized that he was suffering a defeat, and that she was seeing him for the last time. She asked the gods not to separate them. The gods interpreted her request in their own way, and turned her warrior son into a yew tree, who will forever support his old mother – the linden. The trees of the yew tree grove are the warriors of her son’s army, forever keeping guard over Petrov Island.

In total, in addition to the linden tree that is growing right on the yew tree branch, there are 5 other lindens here. Thus there is another legend about this yew and linden composition. The last, great empire of ancient peoples on the island, who were exceptional warriors (both men and women), were fighting the Mongols. The leader of the ancient tribe realized that they were defeated. He and his son were on the mainland, and he sent his son back to Petrov Island to tell his mother and five sisters the news of defeat, and to give them his last bow. His son traveled back to Petrov Island, and from there he and his mother and sisters continued to fight the Mongols. Seriously outnumbered, they gave battle for a long time. Suddenly a Mongol arrow struck all 5 sisters at once. Their mother embraced them, and at the same time she was struck by a spear and also left this world together with her daughters. Her son, left with no other weapons besides his own hands, lifted his mother and sisters up high, so that the Mongols would think they were still alive, and that their empire was still strong and undefeatable.

Here is a view of the same linden with the large knobs on it. This spot is called the “fairy-tale clearing,” although I’m not sure why – except that to me, if did feel like one of the most magical, energy-filled spots in the yew tree grove. The twisted vine on the left side of the picture is in fact a vine, not a tree! It is a liana, and it is the second largest liana in the Russian Far East. It is 37 cm in diameter, while most lianas are 5-7 cm across maximum. Below are a couple more views of it. Pretty amazing.

The tree that Nadya is leaning against in the picture above is called a “cork tree.” Its bark (which feels kind of like cork) is really used to make cork (like for wine bottles, etc.), and actually, if you strip its bark off correctly, it doesn’t harm the tree – the bark will grow back and even be of better quality. There are not many of these trees left now in Primorye, however, because many cork trees were harvested for their timber. Cork trees’ black berries also have medicinal uses, e.g. against colds. The Chinese call this tree the “black pearl.” There is a legend that a Chinese emperor had a favorite pearl, a black pearl. He used to like to take it out in the evening and look at it in the palm of his hand on the shore of the river in the sunset, when it caught the light and made beautiful colors. One day a strong wind blew the pearl away into the river and downstream. Although the emperor’s servants searched for the pearl, they never found it. But downstream a tree grew up, and in the fall it was covered with black berries – black pearls.

This tree is called “demorfant” in Russian, and I cannot find what it is in English. It is cool because it protects itself against being eaten by deer when it is young – it has little needles on its bark. The needles stay around up to 50 years, and we could still feel them in a couple of places on this tree. (Honestly, I’ve never been a huge botany fan, but I learned so much interesting stuff on Petrov Island!)

These tourists are standing under a Mongolian oak, which does not grow in Mongolia, by the way. This tree makes up 60% of Primorye’s forests, mostly because it is very fire-resistant. (Wildfires are a problem here.)

This is one of the 5 natural springs on Petrov Island. You can drink the water here and it is really quite delicious, I tried it (despite the fact that minks and squirrels like to go swimming here, as they told us). According to legend women who drink from this spring will be beautiful, young and fertile, and men will be strong. However, you cannot touch the water with your hands and drink from your hands – you must kneel down and drink directly from your lips.

In the Chinese historical chronicles there is a story of an island inhabited only by women, where there was a spring like this one. A woman who looked into the spring would give birth to a son in 9 months. (How the island remained a place with only women with all those boys getting born is another question…)

The ancient peoples of Petrov Island were shamanistic and believed in gods of nature. There is a spirit of Petrov Island; his name is Leshii. He lives in the hollows of old trees. If a person wanted to do something on the island like cut down a tree, for example, he should ask permission from Leshii. You can also whisper to Leshii a good wish and ask him to bring you some luck or something pleasant (for example, to see a squirrel or mink on your tour of Petrov Island – on one tour we saw two black squirrels; squirrels came here from the mainland). Below this girl is whispering to Leshii.

Below is a Korean pine tree. They say that a Korean pine tree will absorb negative energy from you – but not if you touch it as this little girl is touching it. Instead you should stand with the back of your head, you spine and the backs of your calves touching the tree.

Here is a ripe, green Korean pine cone along the cliffs of the coast of Petrov Island.

And here below are the remains of a ripe pine cone that a squirrel ate. The Korean pine is a very important tree in Primorye’s forests, and its bark, wood and pine cones (nuts) are all used. However, much Korean pine has been logged in the past and continues to be logged (often illegally) today. It grows in virgin forests.

There are 396 species of plants on Petrov Island, while there are only about 50 on neighboring Beltsov Island. There is a fairy tale to explain this, too. When God went to plant trees in the Primorye Region, he had two angel-helpers. One angel was very responsible; he did things as he was told and on time. He got his seeds, counted them out, separated them into packages, and started sprinkling them around, not hurrying and distributing the right amount of seeds in the right places, in the correct proportions. The second angel was not so organized. He was always starting one thing, rushing rushing rushing, and then starting another thing before having finished the first. When he got his seeds he did everything at the last minute, as usual. The last place the two angels got to were Petrov and Beltsov Islands. The first, responsible angel went to Beltsov Island – he had just the right amount of seeds left for a place that size. The second, last-minute angel got Petrov Island. And because he did everything at the last minute, he hadn’t gotten rid of enough of his seeds yet – he had a lot of seeds left, of all kinds! And he scattered them all over Petrov Island, hence there are so many different plant species there today.

In fact the real explanation is probably that people lived constantly on Petrov Island for centuries, and they probably brought seeds over from the mainland (in their clothes, etc.), while there were not continuous inhabitants of Beltsov Island.

These are the roots of a huge fallen Korean pine. You can see that there are stones in the roots – this pine was growing on ancient peoples’ artifacts. Archeologists sure were excited when this pine fell, as they cannot do any digging on Petrov Island, since it is a strict nature reserve – they can only observe with their eyes. (They can dig along the beach on shore, though, where there is no reserve.)

There are 4 rocks that look just like this one on Petrov Island, all equally spaced exactly 80 meters apart. No one knows how they got that way. Archeologists think there is another, 5^th rock in the ocean. They say these rocks have a special energy, and that some people can feel a current coming up from beneath them, as if there is some kind of black magic here.

There has only been one fire on Petrov Island, and it was in this spot. It happened in the early 1980s, when the Russian Far East navy was considering setting up a training base on Petrov Island (nature reserve or no). Two sailors were walking around the island in the fall, when it is fairly dry, and the first sailor was smoking. He tossed his cigarette butt aside and a fire started. The two sailors put out the fire, but one yew tree and a few other trees died. Later that year there was a fire on the boat that the first sailor served on, and he was the only one who died.

Visitors today are not allowed to smoke on the island, of course.

This is a spot where archeologists think ancient peoples may have made animal sacrifices to the gods (on the stones below).

This bay is called the Bay of Love or the Secluded Bay. There is a fairy tale about this spot – an ancient peoples’ Romeo and Juliet and origin myth all in one. A young man and woman from two warring tribes fell in love. They knew their relatives would not approve, and so they fled from the mainland to Petrov Island’s Secluded Bay, where for a time they lived happily and undetected. But one day they heard noises that told them that their relatives had found their hiding place and were approaching by water. The youth took his bride’s hand and led her up the steep coast. (cont’d below)

At the top of the cliff over the coast of the Secluded Bay the youth asked the gods to protect them. And at that spot there grew up a huge fir tree (pictured above) that blocked the relatives’ entrance to the island from the bay and cliffs below. The youth retreated with his bride to the interior, and they became the first inhabitants of Petrov Island.

The yew tree above is a wishing tree. It has a lot of holes in it that are like ears, so it can listen to the wishes you whisper to it. But you should wish for only non-material things, and then your wishes might come true. Here some visitors are wishing away. I have to say that all the visitors I saw on the trail on Petrov Island truly were very interested in what they were learning and behaved themselves very well – they didn’t lag behind, listened very respectfully, did not go off the narrow path, etc.

This yew tree looks like a bonsai. The zapovednik loves to tell a story that they once had Japanese tourists here who wanted to buy this tree because it reminded them of their homeland. They didn’t want to cut the tree down – they just wanted to buy the plot of land. Lazovsky Zapovednik had a hard time explaining to them that that’s not allowed in Russia’s nature reserves.

If you look at this oak tree carefully, you will see that the knob growing on it looks like a Mongoloid face. As you walk past this tree the face is always looking at you. It’s as if someone is watching the behavior of Petrov Island’s guests. Olya says that once she had a visitor who waved his hand disrespectfully in front of the face, and the whole rest of the trail he kept tripping over roots…

This is a view of Beltsov Island from the end of the trail around Petrov Island. (The trail makes a big loop.) Here you can see Beltsov Island well because this part of Petrov Island was logged in the early 1930s, when a few people who were part of a marine expedition lived on the island. They built a 2-apartment house and banya on the island, had a garden, pigs, cows, chickens, dogs, and cats. They worked here for 4 years and left in the mid-1930s. The landscape is totally different in this spot – no trees, only tall grass. In 1936 Petrov Island became part of Lazovsky Zapovednik, and so now there is not this kind of threat to the rest of the untouched forests here.

Hike to Peschanaya Bay

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In addition to tours on Petrov Island, Lazovsky Zapovednik staff also take visitors on a 2 ½ hour tour to Peschanaya Bay. This is a much more laid-back tour – the zapovednik staff are really just accompanying the visitors. There are some amazing views, and at Peschanaya Bay everyone gets to go swimming. This first picture is a view of Petrov Island from the tops of one of the cliffs along the Peschanaya Bay hike.

Here visitors are ascending that very cliff. I went on the Peschanaya Bay hike twice, and the second time we saw deer grazing on this cliff.

This memorial is like a reminder or warning. In the 1970s a ranger at Lazovsky Zapovednik decided to take some tourists on a tour of Petrov Island in January in bad weather. (The bay here doesn’t freeze. In the 70s there were tours even in the winter.) The boat flipped over and the ranger and 9 tourists all drowned.

More cormorants! Drying off in both good and bad weather.

Here are some tiger tracks in the sand at Peschanaya Bay. Nadya estimated that these tracks were about 3 days old. There is a family of Amur tigers (mom, dad, cub) that live in this area of Lazovsky Zapovednik and roam the beach not infrequently. But I did not see any live tigers on this trip – these were my first fresh tiger tracks! The Amur tiger is an engendered species, and there are only around 400-450 left in the Russian Far East (most in Primorsky Krai, some in Khabarovsky Krai). It is estimated there are 10-12 tigers in Lazovsky Zapovednik.

Here are some flowers growing right up out of the rocks.

This is Peschanaya Bay from above.

More scenic pictures below.

Kids Camp at Petrov Island

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From August 6-8 about 50 kids came to the ranger station at Petrov Island for a 3-day overnight camp. (And I thought the zapovednik was busy before...) The kids stay in the 5 cabins at the ranger station and in tents, so there are no other overnight visitors while the kids are there. However, at the same time that the camp is going on Sveta and Nadya still give tours of Petrov Island and Peschanaya Bay for outsiders visitors who come for the day or who are staying in Olenevod, and the zapovednik doesn't increase its staff numbers at the Petrov Island ranger station during the camp. This means that with 50 kids in town, there are plenty of opportunities to help out!

The kids are all winners in a year-long environmental contest held in the Lazovsky District, and the camp is free for them. (For the year-long environmental contest (called "От дня Земли до века Земли") Lazovsky Zapovednik sponsors all kinds of events throughout the year in local schools, e.g. scientific research contests and more.) The kids are from 5 different towns in the Lazovsky District. (But the kids all know each other, even the new kids – if from nothing else than from the environmental contests that they gather at that are sponsored by the zapovednik throughout the year. So the kids are all like a big family (that loves nature), which is really nice – the camp is like a big family coming together.)

Each of the 5 towns is a team. At the camp the 5 teams compete with each other in various competitions (skits, arts and crafts, games, etc.), and the winner is named at the end. The kids range in age from 9 to 16, but most are in the 12-14 range. About half of them have already been to the camp before, and half are new. At the beginning of the camp the kids take down the Lazovsky Zapovednik flag and put up the flag of Lazovsky’s education department (pictured above), so they have their own special flag. It was amazing when the kids arrived at the camp – I was on Petrov Island, and from there we could hear their happy shrieks on shore, especially as they got ready to go swimming.

Up until 2 years ago Lazovsky Zapovednik had a 10-day camp that they had held annually for about 10 years running. However, now they have had to shorten it to 3 days due to various bureaucratic demands. In the picture above the kids are getting initiated into the camp on the first evening. Galina Aleksandrovna is dressed up as Leshii, the nature spirit of Petrov Island. The kids get a swat from a birch branch, then jump through a decorated hula hoop (which I was holding, hence you can’t see it in this picture), and then they got an amulet made of yew tree bark from a yew tree branch that had fallen on Petrov Island this year.

This year Lazovsky also invited a guest team from Northern Primorye to participate in the camp. The director of Lazovsky Zapovednik’s education department, Galina Aleksandrovna, met the director of the environmental club “Namba” earlier this year, got interested in the education work they do with kids of all ages, and invited them to bring a team to Lazovsky’s camp. They traveled 14 hours by bus to get to Lazovsky! However, they ended up being the winning team. In the picture above are the “judges” of the competition. This year the zapovednik decided kids would judge themselves. One judge was selected from each team. Here the selected kid judges are sitting at the judges’ table evaluating environmental skits.

Here the team from town of Preobrazheniye is performing one of its skits. The kids know in advance that there will be creative competitions for environmental skits and games, so they prepare their skits before the camp starts. Each team also has an adult supervisor (usually a teacher from their local school).

Each team also made up its own games related to the environment, and everybody played. The team from Benevskoye chose to do sharades, which the kids really got a kick out of - there were some funny animals to represent. I believe the animal here is a chicken. (The speaker in the background, by the way, is from the evening festivities: on both nights the kids got to have a dance party with all kinds of pop music and even DJs (two local music teachers).)

The kids also had a sand castle building contest. Here is one team working away. The sculptures were really impressive!

On the morning of their second day the kids split into 3 groups and went on a tour of Petrov Island with either Sveta, Nadya or Olya. Above Sveta is explaining the rules of behavior for the tour and some background about Petrov Island at the tour’s start. I went with Sveta’s group through the first part of the tour, through the spring at the end of the yew tree grove, and then they went farther on without me. This meant that I had the absolutely incredible, once in a lifetime opportunity to walk through the yew tree grove on my own, without any tourists or anyone else around, in complete quiet and solitude. It was amazing – I could go up to the trees along the trail and touch them all, breathe deeply, take off my shoes, and take as much time as I wanted to really see and feel the place where I was, remember how much it has meant to people for centuries. Lazovsky Zapovednik gave me a great gift by allowing me to come here, and to get to spend time in the yew tree grove on one’s own is quite a dream. This was all the more special as it was my last time on Petrov Island.

One the last day kids had a relay race competition, just like kids do in the States, and they loved it. There were a lot of different races Here the kids are being turtles – they have to balance the tubs on their backs with no hands.

One of the last things the kids do at the camp is ask nature for forgiveness for the sins man has committed against her. Each team is given a theme (e.g., animals, pollution, etc.) and thinks about man’s actions in relation to that theme. Then everyone gathers together. Each team hangs symbols on a tree (шаманье дерево) to represent how man has hurt nature and to ask forgiveness for it, and they also read a short explanation of their symbols (some of the teams even had written short poems). (e.g., “Forgive us for fires that destroy the forest.” “Forgive us for poaching your animals.” And so on.) I actually really liked this activity – the kids approached it very thoughtfully, and you could see the sense of responsibility on many of their faces. Above kids from Preobrazeniye are in the dining hall preparing their thoughts for this activity. (Behind them in the background are posters the kids' teams all created about their environmental activities during the year.) Below Olya's daughter Anya is hanging a picture of a factory on the tree.

Below are the kids at the closing ceremonies of the camp (Galina Aleksandrovna and Olya are giving out prizes.)

Far Eastern Marine Reserve (July 17 – July 25, 2007)

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I was very lucky to get to spend July 17-July 25 in the Far Eastern Marine Reserve, which is located in the Peter the Great Bay in the northwestern part of the Sea of Japan (see map at right; Peter the Great Bay is the water immediately off the coast of Vladivostok). The waters of the Peter the Great Bay are the most diverse of all the marine waters in Russia. This is partly because the Bay is situated in an area that is not too warm for northern species, and not too cold for southern species. So not only do local species inhabit here, but there are also migrants from northern waters, like the Sea of Okhotsk (which separates Kamchatka from the Russian mainland), and from southern waters (migrants from the south appear in the late summer and fall). The reserve is home to seals, huge mollusks and scallops, trepang (a rare sea cucumber believed to have medicinal properties), many rare species of birds, and more.

The Far Eastern Marine Reserve is a zapovednik, which means it is a strict protected area that is technically not open to tourists, although some tourism is developing here as an income supplement for the reserve. The reserve’s main activities include environmental education, scientific research and processing violations of nature protection regulations. I got to learn about all of these activities while I was at the reserve, as well as see some tourism in action.

The Far Eastern Marine Reserve was created in 1978 and is also a biosphere reserve. While most Russian zapovedniks are run by the Ministry of Natural Resources, the marine reserve was created under the Russian Academy of Sciences and until fall of 2006 was run directly by the Institute of Marine Biology. Now it along with 3 other reserves is administered jointly by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Natural Resources.

I took a lot of pictures and so will try to tell about my time in the reserve through my photos. You can click on any photo to enlarge it. The first two photos (not including the map) here are pictures of the Srednyaya Inlet, where the reserve maintains a ranger station, which is where I lived from July 20-25. The Marine Reserve is made up of 3 parts: a small piece of Popov Island near Vladivostok, where the reserve has an environmental education center, nature museum and six guided trails; an eastern part, which includes the Srednyaya Inlet; and a southern part (which I did not see!).

Popov Island and Environmental Education at the Marine Reserve

From July 17-19 I lived at the Marine Reserve’s environmental education center on Popov Island, which is a 90-minute (and $1.40) boat ride from Vladivostok. Although the reserve also works with local schools to increase knowledge about Russian nature reserves and nature conservation (by giving presentations, offering some seminars for teachers, etc.), most of the reserve’s environmental education activities are focused on Popov Island. Pictured is the sign for the reserve’s environmental education center and nature museum.

A lot of visitors from Vladivostok and throughout Russia come to Popov Island to vacation here in late July, August and early September, when the weather here is beautiful. So there are plenty of people around to educate about the importance of the sea! (Since only a small part of Popov Island is protected in the Marine Reserve, visitors abound everywhere else.) This is a picture of ocean from Popov Island on a sunny day. There are cottages that visitors can rent, and many people also just come with a tent and camp out right on the water on public beaches. Visitors can also stay at the marine reserve’s environmental education center, which has 60 beds, for only 200 rubles per night. The environmental education center is booked solid from the end of July through early September. Most visitors are kids participating in camps, adults participating in seminars, or tourists who are part of a tour firm’s organized trip to Popov Island. Not all of the seminars and camps are related to environmental topics, although some are. (When I was there there were kids at a leadership camp and adults at a psychological training seminar staying at the Marine Reserve’s environmental education center.)

In the same building as the environmental education center there is a museum about the ocean and its protection. The museum has existed since 1977 (first as just an exhibit), although the environmental education department of the reserve has existed only since 1996.) Here kids are checking out models of seals found in the reserve. Visitors can take a guided tour of the museum for 200 rubles (about $8.00) total for a group of up to 25. There are groups that order tours in advance, as well as tourists and vacationers on the island who just stop by.

The environmental education center also houses a room with a bunch of materials for activities related to nature conservation. Here kids can make sculptures out of sea shells, design posters related to nature protection, watch films, read books, and more.

In the next pictures some students from Irkutsk State University are participating in one of the reserve’s 6 guided tours. This tour is called “Ecology and Ancient Peoples,” and these kids are pretending to be two tribes fighting over brides. (Whichever tribe wins the tug of war gets the bride. In reality, the tribes would actually just pull on the bride’s arms, and whichever side let go first lost the bride. Or, if neither side let go, the bride lost an arm.)

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the Marine Reserve developed several trails on Popov Island (only one of which is on the territory of the reserve). They include themes like “Ecology of Popov Island,” “The littoral zone,” “Plants of Popov Island,” “Birds of Popov Island,” “Geology of Popov Island,” and “Ecology and Ancient Peoples.” (There were actually ancient societies on Popov Island, and you can dig up their artifacts (mostly pottery) on the Ecology and Ancient Peoples trail. Kids can also make pottery in the environmental education center.) Tourists can order a tour on one of the trails for 400 rubles (about $15) for a group of up to 25. The tours are 2 hours long and are the same for adults or children. (As Galya, one of the environmental education staff explained to me, adults are really just big kids, after all.)

Guests of the environmental education center, whether they are tourists staying there through a tour firm, participants in a seminar or kids at a camp, are required to buy the zapovenik’s tours as part of the deal to get to stay at the center. (Whether they take the tours or not is their decision – but most people do – they’re pretty fun!) These students from Irkutsk came to Popov Island to do scientific field work, but they ordered this tour for fun. In this last picture one of the students has been selected as the tribe’s shaman, and the blonde next to him is interpreting his words of wisdom for the tribe.

Eastern Part of the Marine Reserve, Science, Tourism and Nature Protection

On July 20 I left Popov Island to go to the “real” reserve (since most of Popov Island isn’t protected, it doesn’t really count). I was picked up by the reserve’s cutter (pictured right docked at the Srednyaya Inlet pier – our destination). The cutter is called the Vnimatel’nyi (“Careful”), and it was taking 3 ichthyologists from the Institute of Marine Biology, Andrei, Volodya (Vladimir) and Ira (Irina) to the eastern part of the reserve to do scientific research on coastal fish populations. They were taking me with them to show me how they work. More below.

When we left Popov Island on July 20 the weather was gorgeous, and we continued to have amazing weather the whole trip. Apparently the summer has begun in southern Primorye! Up until now we have had lots of fog and drizzle since mid-May, including a day-long downpour on July 19. After about a 4-hour trip south we arrived at our destination, the reserve’s ranger station (kordon) at the Srednyaya Inlet, pictured here. The buildings from left to right are: a banya (sauna where you can also wash), a gazebo with a table and a great view, and a house recently build by newly-rich Russians. At the top of the staircase leading up from the pier there is also a house where the ranger at Srednyaya Inlet lives. There are two rangers who work at Srednyaya on one-month shifts. While we were there the ranger was Ivan, one of the nicest people I have ever met.

If you are thinking, wow, that ranger station seems really nice, you’re right, it is! Most Russian reserves suffer from major budget shortfalls and ranger stations usually consist of one building that is not in great shape. But the Marine Reserve has an advantage of being very scenic, and in order to make up for budget shortfalls, it allows a few forms on tourism. One form is allowing rich Russians from Vladivostok to come to the reserve on the weekends to vacation. They come on their own boats (pictured). These rich tourists get a nice quiet place to vacation (many beaches near Vlad are very crowded). In return they conclude a contract with the reserve to rent the land where the ranger station is located for ten years and make improvements on this land. At the end of the ten years, anything they build becomes property of the reserve (unless the reserve renews the rental agreement).

There are 8 ranger stations in the Marine Reserve, and the territory of almost all of them is being rented by some rich Russians. At the Srednyaya Inlet ranger station these Russians built the staircase leading up from the pier, remodeled the banya, remodeled half of the ranger’s house, build the gazebo and another house for themselves (the two-story wooden house with the red roof two pictures ago). Obviously, no one can use the facilities built by these rich Russians without their permission. These rich tourists-renters were vacationing at the Srednyaya Inlet with their friends from July 20-22, when we were there. Ira and I lucked out and got their permission to stay in the remodeled half of the ranger’s house. Above is a picture of the inside – check out that fireplace! When Putin came to the Marine Reserve in 2004, he spent several hours in this room in this house – he had a meeting there and took a break. So, that’s right – Ira and I lived in the same house as Putin – if you’re not impressed, you should be!

Here is a picture of the outside of the ranger’s house. The location was just beautiful. There was also a convenient and very comfortable hammock right outside. The rangers at this station keep a garden where they grow everything from beets to strawberries, and where it smells wonderfully of cilantro.

The rich Russians who vacation at the Srednyaya Inlet also have kayaks, which they leave at the inlet even when they’re not there. So Ira and I went kayaking! I have never been kayaking before, and it was a lot of fun. Kayaks can go pretty fast – even when you feel like you’re not moving, you are.

Ivan and the other ranger at Srednyaya bought themselves a dog this year, Dik. He is a super energetic puppy. They say the dogs here don’t last too long, unfortunately – tigers migrate into the territory of the reserve in the winter, following the wild boars that come in – and tigers love dogs – mmmm…yummy, a real delicacy. Here is Dik playing in the water on the shore of the Srednyaya Inlet.

The height of poaching season in the reserve is the spring and fall. Most poachers come into the waters of the reserve to harvest trepang, a sea cucumber which is rare and is highly sought after on the Chinese market for its medicinal properties. Poachers also come into the reserve to harvest scallops. This picture is from a lookout point about a 5-minute walk from the Srednyaya Inlet ranger station – obviously, you can see far out into the ocean. During poaching season Ivan sits here all day (he built a bench nearby) and looks for poachers. If he sees someone, he radios over to the other ranger stations and they go out on their motor boats to tell the poachers to leave the territory of the reserve.

At this time of year there is also a problem with residents of nearby towns driving on all-wheel drive vehicles to the beaches of the reserve to tan and go for a swim. We saw about 5 groups (of 2-4 people) of these kinds of tourists while we were there. They don’t have permission to be in the reserve, which is literally only the water, or on the coast, which is the buffer zone, so Ivan would normally take his motor boat over and tell them to leave. However, currently his boat has no motor – it’s being repaired. Repairs are also a chronic problem in Russian nature reserves. Here is another pretty picture of the Srednyaya Inlet, and a sign saying “Far Eastern Marine Reserve. Visiting Prohibited."

There are also a lot of really pretty and interesting flowers in the reserve. Here are a couple that I saw, although unfortunately, I don’t know what they’re called.

A Tour with Ivan

Ivan took me on a little 3-hour tour of the area around the Srednyaya Inlet on July 23, after the rich tourists left. Since Ivan has been working in the reserve for 4 years, and living at this station one month on-one month off during all that time, he knows quite a lot about the surrounding area and has done a lot of exploring. At the beginning of our hike, as we walked away from the coast, we saw literally fields of orange butterflies pollinating white flowers. The hike was beautiful.

Here is a picture of a filbert bush (that’s the nut, filbert). There are tons of these bushes all around the reserve, and they can be quite tall. Since Ivan and I weren’t on a path, in some places we just plowed right through the scratchy filbert bushes, which were sometimes taller than us. The nuts will come out of those little green pods in the fall. They are a good source of food for a lot of wild animals, including wild boar, a typical inhabitant of the Russian Far East.

Next: the little pool barely visible in this picture is a spot where wild boars go “swimming.” They dig a hole that fills with mud and water. In the evening they take a bath in this pool, getting coated with mud that then dries on their fur. This caked mud protects them from biting insects.

Here is a huge mushroom growing on a dead pine tree trunk! In Russian these mushrooms are called трутовые грибы. They are very hard, and nobody eats them (“Except maybe the Chinese,” says Ivan. “I don’t know about them; they eat everything.”) The mushrooms grow only on old or dead trees. This mushroom was probably about as big as my head.

Here Ivan is showing how big the leaves are on the Mongolian Oak (дуб монгольский). This is a common tree in the Russian Far East. (There is also regular oak here.) As you can see the leaves are much bigger than the leaves on a regular oak tree. However, all of the Mongolian oaks I have seen are smaller in size than regular oaks.

This is a pine tree. In Russian this tree is called mogil’naya sosna, literally, “sepulchral pine” (могильная сосна; Pinus funebris Kom.). It grows mostly at the tops of the hills surrounding the inlets on the coast, and in the rocks along the coast. Below is another picture of this tree growing along the top of the coast, right out of the rocks, it seems.

This is a huge hole that a wild boar dug in search of a badger. Wild boars are omnivores and really eat everything – from nuts to chipmunks to badgers and more. They are known to rip apart chipmunks’ burrows in the winter and eat the hibernating chipmunks right along with their supplies of nuts. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture the size of this hole, but I could have easily jumped in there and laid down. In this case the boar didn’t catch the badger, though – you can see the tunnels where he escaped.

Boars are pretty interesting animals. They can hang out in herds of 5-40 individuals, but they walk in a line single file. While a lot of animals, like deer, lie down in the evening (or day time) for a rest or to sleep in one spot, and then move on, boars take the time to build themselves a nest and return to it for a few days on end. They put a bunch of leaves in the middle and then build up dirt around the leaves. They’ll stay here for about 10 days, eating everything in the area and returning to the same spot to sleep – and then they move on. In Russian their nests are called a “гайно” (“gajno”) – above is a picture.

Here is one of the views of the coastline from Ivan’s and my hike. This spot was very steep and we plowed right through those filbert bush fields to walk through here. Ivan ordered no looking down :-). At these end of this little 5-minute trek along a cliff – continuation of the wild board theme! – Ivan showed me the leftovers of a wild boar that an Amur tiger killed here in the winter. (See picture below.)

I was amazed at how much the tiger left behind – the skin, fur, skull and more! For comparison, I got to see what wolves had left behind of a deer in Khingansky Zapovednik in June, and that was just a few tufts of fur. Anyway, a bunch of other animals had gotten to eat what they wanted of the boar since the winter, so there were no flies buzzing around the carcass or anything. Ivan estimates that this boar was about a meter tall and weighed 300 kilograms – whoa! (And they can be bigger than that.) Ivan gave me the two little tusks from this boar as a souvenir.

On our hike we also got a view of the islands out in the Peter the Great Bay that are also included in the eastern part of the Marine Reserve. Here is a picture of them that I took while exploring another time on my own. The reserve extends another 2 miles beyond these islands. Imagine, on the biggest of these islands there is a ranger station where someone is always living! Hopefully he doesn’t get restless there.

Here is a picture of some of my souvenirs from the marine reserve: two huge scallop shells, a whole sea urchin skeleton, wild boar tusks, and feathers from a mandarin duck and a blue thrush (also gifts from Ivan; these are both rare birds – Ivan found their feathers on one of his hikes – obviously a predator had killed them).

Science in the Marine Reserve

So back to science. Ira, Andrei and Volodya are studying ichthyoplankton (microscopic fish, for the lay person), juvenile fish, and adult fish inhabiting along the coast of the eastern part of the Marine Reserve, with the goal of simply determining the species composition in different types of coastal habitats in the eastern part of the reserve. Amazingly, these populations have never been studied in this part of the reserve, although Ira, Andrei and Volodya have done this research in the southern part of the reserve.

Many scientists, from the Institute of Marine Biology and other institutes, propose projects to the Marine Reserve for research. If the reserve is interested in the research, it invites the scientists to work in the reserve. So Ira, Andrei and Volodya on behalf of the Ichthyology Laboratory at the Institute of Marine Biology concluded a contract with the Marine Reserve to complete this work, since the reserve does not have enough staff with enough expertise to do this work itself. Later Andrei, Ira and Volodya were met by another Institute scientist, Dmitry. Although they wanted to do this work in the reserve every month from May through October, this is only their first trip out this year, and they think they will be lucky if they get to go out again in October. Things don’t always go as you plan in Russia!

As I said, these guys are looking at ichthyoplankton, juveniles and adult fish. The first two pictures here are from the ichthyoplankton part of Ira, Andrei and Volodya’s work. In the first picture they have lowered a big net to catch plankton into the ocean from the side of the cutter Vnimatel’nyi. The cutter then turns for 5 minutes, dragging the net in a big circle. Then they pull the net in and collect an ichthyoplankton sample from a bottle at the bottom of the net. Above Volodya and Dmitry are pulling the net in, and then Irina, Andrei and Dmitry are moving the sample into a marked bottle.

We took the ichthyoplankton samples in the evening two evenings in a row, at 24 different locations along the coast. Sometimes we got some great views while driving out to the sampling points – here are some pictures of the kekurs (that’s those rocks) just off the coast of the inlet next to the Srednyaya Inlet. These kekurs are called the “cormorant kekurs,” and you can see a huge number of cormorants perched atop them. Seals also like to sunbathe on the smaller rocks sticking out of the water near these kekurs, and we saw quite a few seals here (10 or so) during the daytime (but too far away to photograph).

In order to collect juvenile fish, the scientists drag a net (seine) through the tributaries (little streams, that is) flowing into the ocean’s inlets, and they also do a drag along the shore near these tributaries.

In the first picture Andrei and Volodya are preparing the seine for a drag through a little stream, and in the second Andrei, Volodya and Irina are sorting out the fish that they caught in the seine. (If the juveniles are a rare or unique species, they keep them in formaline and take them back to the Institute. If not, they let them go.)

Finally, there is work to figure out the species composition of adult fish in the Srednyaya Inlet. Andrei and Volodya set up traps and nets every evening in different habitats (e.g., in the grass, in the sand, near a cliff, etc.) in the inlet and checked them each morning for fish. (The adults that get trapped in the nets die.) Here Irina and Dmitry are sorting pulling fish out of the nets.

The types of fish that end up in the nets differs depending on the habitat on the bottom of the inlet (and also depending on the time of year, we can assume – but that’s not relevant right now). For the most part we caught a lot of sea perch (especially when they set the nets in the grass (seaweed, that is!)) and flounder. However, we caught a lot of sardines when the nets were set closer to cliffs. Andrei is setting the fish (perch) to be measured.

Finally, the nets have to be cleaned of all the seaweed that falls into them (you string up the net and pick out the seaweed), and then the nets get put away until the evening, when they are set again. Here Ivan and Volodya are putting a net that has been cleaned back into its bag.

By the way, to avoid killing fish for no reason, or, rather, just for the sake of science, the scientists try to eat most everything they catch! We had fried perch, flounder and redeye, as well as soup from fish (ukha), and a whole lot of shrimp. (Shrimp end up in these nets a lot.)

That’s about all! Here are three final pictures of the reserve. The first is the inlet next to Srednyaya Inlet, with a view of the Cormorant Kekurs. Next is a view of the Pacific from Srednyaya Inlet. And, of course, nothing would be complete without the requisite ocean sunset picture.

Summer in Vladivostok (July 8, 2007)

2007-07-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Upon arriving back to a foggy 55-degree Vladivostok from sunny 95-degree Birobidzhan on July 7, I was reminded of that quote that is always attributed to Mark Twain -- "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Obviously, he never spent a summer in Vladivostok. They say the warm weather is soon to come, and late July and August will be downright hot! But for now we are in the midst of the same mist, fog and cool temperatures that have been the norm here since mid-May. That's okay; I'll take this weather over 95 any day.

So of course most of my life seems to be consumed by traveling and then catching up these days, and I guess that will be the case through the fall! But I have also started reading an excellent book totally unrelated to my project. It is called "An UnClean Force" (poor translation by me there -- Нечистая сила in Russian, by popular modern history writer Valentin Pikul'), and it's about Russia in the early 20th century, leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, and the influence of Rasputin. It's pretty fascinating stuff (well, and kind of creepy). I definitely recommend it!

June Travels (June 9 – July 7, 2007)

2007-07-08T04:57:00.000-07:00

On June 9 I left Vladivostok for a month of traveling in the Amur Region and Jewish Autonomous Region (north and west of Vladivostok, but also on the border with China; the Amur Region is the red blob on the map at right, and the Jewish Autonomous Region is a tiny little bit of land snuggled right up to the southeast side of the Amur Region). There I visited Muraviovka Park, Russia’s only private nature reserve (Amur Region; June 11 – June 15); Khingansky Zapovednik (Amur Region; June 15-July 2), and Zapovednik Bastak (Jewish Autonomous Region; July 2-7). It was a great trip, and you can read more about it in the following posts.

It is amazing to think of the places you'll go! Back when I had to learn the capitals of all the regions of Russia while studying in Irkutsk in 2004, places like Blagoveschensk (the capital of the Amur Region) and Birobidzhan (the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region) seemed like unbelievably far-away dots on a map, places I would never even think twice about, except to try to get my tongue around their exotic-sounding names. And now I have even been in places seemingly even farther away, like Arkhara, a town of 9000 people in the Amur Region near Khingansky Zapovednik, and these places have taken on such meaning for me, all because I met a few amazing people there. Life can certainly be unexpected! I am so excited by the opportunities I have here, and am left with a constant feeling of gratitude to everyone who has helped to make them possible.

Taking the Train and Blagoveschensk (June 9 – 11, 2007)

2007-07-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

I decided to take the train from Vladivostok to the capital of the Amur Region, Blagoveschensk. Blagoveschensk was the farthest western point in my journey, and from there I slowly made my way east, back towards Vladivostok.

It takes 34 hours to get to Blagoveschensk on the train. The whole ride you have a feeling that it could take much less time, but this is a very slow train! After Khabarovsk it does go much faster. After Khabarovsk the scenery begins to change, too -- in general it gets flatter. The geography in Amur and Jewish Autonomous Regions is a bit different than the places I have been so far in southern Primorye, where Vladivostok is: there are still plenty of steep hills with forests of birch and oak, but there are also more meadows and wetlands (good habitat for lots of birds), and places that are just flat.

So back to the train. I rode “platskart,” which is the cheap way to ride in Russia. A one-way platskart ticket for the 34-hour ride from Vladivostok to Blagoveschensk costs a little less than $40. This is the real Russian way to ride the train, which is a truly Russian experience anyway. A platskart wagon has 54 sleeping bunks in it, 27 lower bunks and 27 upper bunks. It is a completely open wagon with no dividers or doors to close off the bunks from your neighbors. There are some walls though, and the bunks are arranged in groups of 6 – a lower bunk and upper bunk right along the walls of the train, separated by an aisle from a group of 4 bunks (2 upper and 2 lower) perpendicular to the wall of the train. You do not want the former type of bunk, because then people walking down the aisle will run into you all the time when you are trying to sleep. Although this was the type of bunk I got on the way to Blagoveschensk – all the good spots were taken! Fortunately I was on the bottom and so I at least didn’t have to climb up all the time. And, fortunately I had good neighbors and no one in our wagon was loud and/or drunk all night. So it was a good experience! As was the train ride home in early July.

There are more comfortable ways to do Russian train travel – you can take coupe, which has 36 bunks in a wagon, arranged in groups of 4 (2 upper, 2 lower) with a door closing each group off from the aisle. This is about 2 ½ times more expensive than platskart. And then there is luxury or S/V – only 2 bunks, both lower – swanky! I have no idea how much this costs, but flying is probably cheaper.

I left Vladivostok at 11 pm on June 9 and arrived to Blagoveschensk at 9 am on June 11. One of the staff from Muraviovka Park, my first destination, met me at the train station in Blago. I checked my luggage and spent the day wandering around Blagoveschensk waiting for the bus to Muraviovka at 5 pm. Blago is right on the Amur River, and you can look across the Amur and see China. It is a city of 250,000 people, and I immediately felt how much calmer it is than Vladivostok. First of all, it is flat – which rather helps. No walking up crazy hills all the time. The streets are wider, the architecture allows for actual spaces between the buildings, and there are actually signal lights in the pedestrian crosswalks, and moreover, cars actually stop at them. And there aren’t even that many cars – sometimes you can cross a street without waiting for a signal! Amazing stuff. After wandering into a few stores in Blago I also started to understand why everyone says that everything costs twice as much in Vladivostok. If the cheapest loaf of bread costs 16 rubles in Vlad (about 60 cents), then is costs only 9 rubles in Blago.

The Amur Region is known for being hot and humid in the summer, and I could already feel it in Blagoveschensk – when I arrived at 9 am it was already 80 degrees out. But overall I was very lucky with the weather, and it only got really hot during the last week of my travels – the first week of July.

Pictures: 1. A typical Russian train station (this is the station in Khabarovsk); 2. and 3. A wagon in platskart; 4. arch in Blagoveschensk, constructed in the late 1800s for tsar-to-be Nikolai II’s travel through Blago on his way back to St Petersburg from Japan in 1891 (Japan-Vlad-and on west, you get it). 5. Amur River and China on the other side; 6. World War II memorial in Blago. ; 7. “Our politics is the politics of the world!” Soviet mural in Blagoveschensk. Blagoveschensk felt very Soviet in some ways – lots of Soviet monuments and propaganda left over

Muraviovka Park for Sustainable Land Use (June 11 – 15, 2007)

2007-07-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

On the afternoon of June 11 I left Blagoveschensk for Muraviovka Park for Sustainable Land Use, Russia’s only private nature reserve. The park is about 60-90 minute drive from Blagoveschensk, and the closest town to it is Muraviovka, 2-3 km away with a population of 800. Muraviovka Park was founded in 1994 by Sergei Smirenskii, and it is the only nature reserve in Russia that is not funded by the government, and is not part of the Russian government’s system of local, regional and federal-level nature reserves. This has both its plusses and minuses – the main plus being that the park has a lot of independence to do what it wants to do; the minus being that the park has no strong arm of the government to fall back on if it has troubles, and that doing something out of the norm in Russia, especially if there is any foreign backing involved, sometimes brings the kind of suspicion that will increase your troubles.

Most of Muraviovka’s funding comes from international sources, including the International Crane Foundation (more on cranes below). THe park also supports a lot of its activities from money it raises on its own, through environmental education camps, tours and accomodations for visitors, selling some crops, and more. The territory of the park is rented from the local government under a long-term lease agreement. In Russia, if you rent land you must use it – you cannot just declare it a nature reserve and let it sit there. For Muraviovka this is an acceptable condition, because the park’s goal is to show that environmental protection and economic development can complement, rather than contradict, each other. Thus part of the territory of Muraviovka Park is under cultivation to grow soy, barley and wheat for sale, all without using any pesticides or herbicides. Muraviovka tries to attract local residents to work on this small-scale agricultural enterprise, making it a way to improve living standards in poor local villages near the park – something inspiring to think about in theory, but is hard to make happen in practice. (After all, “sustainable development” may be a buzz word, but how many real successful examples of sustainable development are there out there? It is very impressive to see people really working to make this happen.)

The park also grows corn that is used to feed rare cranes that stop at the park in the fall on their migrations south to China, Korea and Japan for the winter. Muraviovka is an important nesting and migration stopover point for the rare red-crowned and white-naped crane (японский и даурский журавли), as well as the Far-Eastern stork (дальневосточный аист). These 3 species are listed in the Russian and World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red Books as endangered. Muraviovka also provides habitat for 4 other species of cranes. Each year there may be a few pairs or individuals of each of these species that nest in 6000-hectare Muraviovka Park in the spring and then inhabit it through the summer, plus hundreds that stop over here to rest and feed during the fall migration south. (The territory of Muraviovka is an important stopover on the birds’ migration routes.)

Cranes and storks are also signature species at Khingansky Zapovednik, my next destination. At Muraviovka I started to learn more about the ecology and biology of these birds – where they nest (cranes build their nests in wetlands; storks in the trees), what they eat (mostly little fish), what their behavior is like, what they are threatened by. Cranes are known for their dancing, and they can dance anytime, just because they feel good. While wintering a whole flock can start dancing with one crane in the lead. Red-crowned cranes have the most complicated dances, and it even can be the case that every pair has its own dance. Each species of crane also has its calls, and you can identify 10-15 different calls, signifying such things as alarm, that there is food nearby, and so on.

Lately there has been a drop in numbers of red-crowned cranes in the Amur Region. Some think this might be due to the construction of hydroelectric dams on the Zeya and Bureya Rivers (tributaries to the Amur), which significantly reduce flooding of wetlands and marshy areas, drying them out. Red-crowned cranes even more than other species really need wetlands, and they can’t adapt to another place if they dry out.

While I was at Muraviovka we had opportunities to see pairs of white-naped cranes and Far-Eastern storks in the park with chicks. (The chicks are born in the spring – May – and the parents and chicks will stay in the park until the fall migration south.) You can’t approach them closely, and you have to be very quiet, but you can see them through binoculars. We also saw “bachelor” red-crowned cranes, as well as roe deer. The best time to see them is early in the morning – which means I was up at or before 6 am a couple of days! In June in the Amur Region the sun is already up at 5:00 am, and does not go down until about 10:30 pm.

Muraviovka Park keeps one red-crowned crane (named Kivili), two mandarin ducks (also a rare species), and one swan goose in pens at the park. Visitors to the park like to visit them. Muraviovka is known for being very strong in environmental education activities. Every year the park holds several 1-2-week long international environmental education camps (Russian-American, Russian-Chinese, Russian-Korean), pulling in both local kids and foreigners (Chinese and Korean kids), as well as Russian, American, and Chinese teachers. At least one camp each year is conducted all in English. This year in June and July Muraviovka has 3 camps (Russian-American, Russian-Korean, Russian-Chinese-American) that 200 kids total will attend.

Muraviovka sponsors contests for both kids and adults related to nature conservation, and the projects the park receives are pretty amazing – real works of art. At the park itself, in addition to camps, Muraviovka also gives guided tours for visitors along a short environmental trail, and has a small environmental education center. The camps the park offers and the tours are not free (and neither is staying as the park), as the park uses the money it makes to stay in existence – it has no government funding, after all, and works to earn money on its own. Its ultimate – although perhaps unattainable – goal is to make enough money to cover all its costs – right now it earns money on the sale of the crops it grows, on camps and tours, and on overnight guest fees.

While I was at Muraviovka I was lucky to get to spend plenty of time chatting with 4 of the park’s staff members – Sergei, the park’s founder, Marina, the park’s current director (who also teaches English at a local school), Galya, a university student doing summer field work in the park on crane roosting sites, and Svetlana, who works mostly out of Blagoveschensk. Marina lives at the park year-round, even in the frigid and snowy Amur Region winters. These guys take care of everything from weeding and painting to piles of administrative paperwork to organizing workers for the fields. I really enjoyed spending time with them, and even though I was in Muraviovka for only 4 days, I already felt attached to them by the end. They are real enthusiasts, plus very friendly, and it is always wonderful to see people so dedicated to what they do.

On my third day at Muraviovka a group of Korean filmmakers came to the park from Khingansky Zapovednik, and they brought with them an American graduate student, Robin, who is in vet school at Cornell and doing summer field work on parasites in cranes at Khingansky’s Center for Reintroduction of Rare Birds. Robin graduated from Harvard the same year that I graduated from Wellesley. It is amazing where you will meet another intrepid Americans – off in the middle of nowhere in the Russian Far East! Robin and I would get to spend more time together in Khingansky, too.

Fun fact: The Amur Region is the number-one grower of marijuana in Russia. It just grows here like weeds! Literally, we saw whole fields of it.

Pictures: 1. Scenic Kapustikha Lake in the evening, near the main resident (office, housing, etc.) at Muraviovka Park; 2. June is the season for beautiful irises in the Amur region; 3. and 4. Kivili, a red-crowned crane in captivity at the park. He was more than a meter tall.; 5. rushes along Kapustikha Lake; 6. A far-away view of Muraviovka’s environmental education center; 7. Kids on a tour check out Kivili;8. A swan goose. This guy was aggressive and would lower his head and charge at visitors to his pen; 9. Inside one of the cabins where kids and teachers stay during the environmental camps (this one was super nice!); 10. Marina and Sergei; 11. me and Galya

Khingansky Zapovednik (June 15 – July 2, 2007)

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On Friday, June 15 I left Muraviovka for Blagoveschensk, and from Blagoveschensk took a 5-hour afternoon and evening bus ride to the town of Arkhara, near Khingansky Zapovednik. (Arkhara is a town of about 9000 people, and Khingansky’s main office is located there.) It was hot! No trip in

Russia

is without adventure, and we changed busses halfway through. The bus we took on the second half of the road to Arkhara was actually air-conditioned! This was a very good thing, because not all roads are well-paved, and there can be a lot of dust flying around – not so pleasant with open windows. (Picture: Lake Klyoshenskoye, Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo, Khingansky Zapovednik)

I arrived to Arkhara at 9 pm and was met by the director of Khingansky Zapovednik’s science department, Slava. I had been corresponding with him over email for 2 months already and was really, really looking forward to my trip to Khingansky. Slava has been working at Khingansky Zapovednik since the early 1990s. He is a really enthusiastic and talkative guy, ready to show you everything, and to give you a detailed answer to any question about the zapovednik, science and more, with stories to go along. I have to say he taught me a lot about Khingansky, and I am so glad he made it possible for me to come visit and learn about the reserve’s work and its science department.

Slava decided we would go straight to the zapovednik – no need to spend the weekend in Arkhara. So he grabbed his backpack, we bought some groceries, and at about 9:30 we hopped into one of the zapovednik’s vans and headed out to the zapovednik’s ranger station on Lake Klyoshenskoye, about a 45-minute drive away. Khingansky zapovednik is divided into two parts, or clusters (see map left), and Lake Klyoshenskoye is located in the smaller and more western of these two clusters, which founded in 1978 and is called Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo. The other, larger cluster was the original territory of the zapovednik, created in 1963. The ranger station on Lake Klyoshenskoye is by far the nicest ranger station in Khingansky Zapovednik, with a fairly new two-story house with a kitchen and 4 bedrooms for guests. Lake Klyoshenskoye is also home to the Station for Reintroduction of Rare Birds, just a few dozen meters this two-story house. At the Station there is also a kitchen and housing for the Station’s staff, plus pens for breeding and rehabilitating rare Far-Eastern storks, red-crowned and white-naped cranes, plus swans. Of course, there is no electricity here. (There is actually an underground refrigerator for keeping food in! You put the food in a plastic bag, tie it to the end of a 10-foot long rope, and lower it down into a hole.) (Picture: Robin using the underground fridge.)

The road does not go all the way to the ranger station, though. It ends on the opposite side of Lake Klyoshenskoye. So we got out, I put on my track pants on over my shorts (plenty of mosquitos here), we piled our stuff into a row boat, and Slava rowed us across the lake to the ranger station. We didn’t stay in the station, though – we camped in a tent. Slava told me a world of information about Khingansky Zapovednik, probably until about 2 in the morning or some ridiculous hour, especially considering we would get up at 5:30 the next day to take a hike through the Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo! (Picture: ranger station at Lake Klyoshenskoye)

Actually, getting up early in the Amur Region at this time of year is definitely not a bad thing. The sun is already up. There are fewer bugs, and it is not nearly as hot. This is a very good thing, because even though there are fewer bugs, there are still lots of bugs in the field (mosquitoes, horseflies and ticks), which means you need to wear long pants and long sleeves no matter the temperature. Plus when it is cooler the animals are more active. And although Slava has so much energy that I was almost frightened of the treks through the wilderness that may lie ahead of me, exploring in the morning and the evening means you can relax and sleep in the heat in the afternoon. (Picture: swan from Station for Reintroduction)

So on my second day at Khingansky Slava and I set out at 6 am on a 3-4-hour hike through the Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo. The Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo is all lowlands, about 50% of it is marsh, another 10-15% is birch and oak forest. For this hike we stayed mostly in the forest. (The second cluster of Khingansky Zapovednik, about three times as big and further east, is about ½ small hills (300-400 m high) and half wetlands.)

We headed out through the woods (Slava pointing out or talking about something interesting the whole way) until we reached a spot with a view over a marshy meadow. From here we could look out through binoculars over the meadow to find roe deer, cranes and storks, and from this spot we saw 6 roe deer, 2 Far Eastern storks, and 1 pair of white-naped cranes. Not bad! Later on while walking through the woods and a bit of marsh we saw one roe deer fairly close-up (he bounded away from us), hawks, and all kinds of flowers (lilies and orchids.) There were so many caterpillars in the woods that they were falling on us constantly! I think both of us probably had 2-3 caterpillars attached to our clothes at all times. (Pictures: Slava checking for deer and birds (above); orchid bashmachok -- ladies' slipper (below))

In the evening we headed out on another hike, going the opposite direction. This time we were mostly in the marsh, which can make for some difficult walking. Although the marsh does not smell, and is not too wet in June (you can get by with some short rubber boots (galoshes)), there are lots of round bumpy tufts of earth that stick out of a marsh, about a foot high or more, with lots of tall grass growing on top. In between these mounds are little shallow channels of water, say about 4 inches wide. This is pretty uneven ground to walk on! You can either try to walk from tuft top to tuft top – but the tufts are pretty uneven themselves – or walk in between the tufts – almost impossible. Apparently, you get better with practice, but I felt pretty clumsy and jounced around, and was glad when we reached a wooden-plank trail that the zapovednik laid this year to make it easier to move about when fighting fires. We followed that trail out to a spot where four wolves had killed a roe deer a couple of weeks ago. While Slava searched for the few tufts of fur the wolves had left behind, I marveled at the size and number of fat reddish mosquitoes flying all around me in the heat. Oh, adventures! (Picture: A roe deer scratched his antlers on this little tree - a common picture)

That evening I met another visitor to the ranger station at Klyoshenskoye – a governmental official from Rosprirodnadzor, the agency that oversees the zapovedniks. He had just returned to Russia from a 20-day trip to Oregon and Washington, where, among other places, he had visited the Wild Salmon Center…small world!

On Monday I left the ranger station at Lake Klyoshenskoye and spent the week in Arkhara, where I got to meet 3 other science department staff, Lyosha, Marina and Misha, and spend a lot of time exploring the zapovednik’s publications and library, learning more about both Khingansky and the Russian PA system. Lyosha and Marina are married, and they took me in while I was in Arkhara, letting me live with them for a few days. They were just wonderful! I am so lucky to have met so many kind, generous, smart and thoughtful people at Khingansky. They really made it a special place for me. (Picture: me dressed to protect against bugs in the hear, in front of zapovednik buffer zone sign)

Khingansky Zapovednik Activities

Like all zapovedniks, Khingansky has 3 departments: science, education and protection; plus it also has the Station for Reintroduction of Rare Birds.

I spent almost all of my time at Khingansky with the staff in the science department. In addition to coordinating long-term monitoring of zapovednik ecosystems for the annual “Nature Chronicles,” like all zapovedniks, Khingansky also organizes scientific work related to a number of different topics, such as conservation of stork and sandpiper populations (Lyosha and Misha are the zapovednik’s 2 ornithologists – Lyosha studies shorebirds, Misha studies storks and cranes); the influence of fires and fire management; the influence of climate change; productivity of small bodies of water, and so on. (Pictures: above: Lake Klyoshenskoye; below: Slava preparing a raft for a scientific expedition to the Bureya River)

Some of the coolest work the science department does are winter counts of ungulate (hooved) species (deer, wild boar, etc). Each December and February they work in teams to ski on huge wide wooden and furry skis over 250 km (!) of routes through both clusters of the zapovednik, counting tracks. And they love it! Slava claims that one year they did these counts on a day that is was 50 below zero. (The Amur Region has a fairly extreme climate.) Khingansky is also unique in its use of GIS technology for science in the zapovednik – for example, they can map fires and also the sites of preventive burns. And they have a satellite system for monitoring fires in the zapovednik, thanks to a grant from US Fish and Wildlife Service.

I have to say that I thought all of the scientists that I met at Khingansky were fantastic. They were all very enthusiastic about what they’re doing, and the fact that they do a lot of work together, on expeditions, really makes it seem like they are a united group. In the words of Lyosha, “ As Sergei Ignatenko [the former science director] says – a team.” (Picture: Heron takes off on Lake Klyoshenskoye)

The main threats in the zapovednik are fires (by far number 1 – there can be very serious fires in the Amur Region), and most of the efforts of the nature protection department are focused on fire fighting and prevention. In the spring and winter both the rangers in the reserve and the science staff do preventative burns in set areas. Last year Khingansky also held a seminar for local farmers (who often are suspected of setting fires to improve soil fertility, that then rage out of control) about burning, and has plans to work with local residents around the Arkharinsky District who set fires, so that they will do so responsibly. Another threat, particularly to bird populations, is the Bureiskoye Dam and Reservoir, on the Bureya River. The dam decreases natural flooding and can lead to the drying out of wetlands needed by cranes, for example. Of course, there is also the threat of poaching for fish and deer, boar, etc on the territory of the reserve. Back in the 1990s the inspectors here used to set spikes behind the cars of poachers who drove into the zapovednik in the winter illegally to hunt deer and boar – once your tires get popped, you might think again about hunting in the reserve. Slava noted that boars today in the reserve versus outside of the reserve demonstrate interesting behavior: boars in the reserve forage for food in the day and sleep at night – obviously, they feel comfortable walking around in broad daylight without fear that they’ll get shot – but boars in neighboring unprotected territories do the opposite – they sleep during the day and forage at night. (Pictures: above: Lake Klyoshenskoye as sun goes down; to left: sign for Khingansky's environmental education camp, "Khingan Country")

The education department at Khingansky has been running annual environmental education camps on Lake Dolgoe in the buffer zone of the Antonovskoye Lesnichestvo since 1996. They also have a kids scientific conference for the Amur Region, for which participants design their own scientific research projects in the field (the winners go to camp for free); Khingansky has involved kids in counting birds (cranes, storks, etc) in the zapovednik, planting trees and conducting fire prevention measures; and they have held various artistic contests, and more.

The Station for Reintroduction of Rare Birds has been around since 1988 and breeds red-crowned and white-naped cranes for release into the zapovednik. It is very difficult to breed and release these birds successfully into the wild – they may not fly away south on winter migrations, for example, or they might just keep coming back to the place they hatched, rather than finding their own spot in nature. Most reintroduction stations release chicks into the wild in the fall (the chicks hatch in the spring and migrate south in the fall), but the station at Khingansky waits until the chicks are a year old and release them the next spring, reasoning that several month-old chicks can’t find their way south to migrate their first fall – they don’t have the usual help from their parents, since they were born in captivity. (Picture above: Lena washing basins at pier at Station for Reintroduction of Rare Birds)

The station also keeps swans and Far Eastern storks. When I was there, there were 2 month-old storks there who had fallen out of their nest in a strong wind storm in early June (pictured above). (Last picture (to right): Lake Klyoshenskoye)

Expedition to the Bureya River (June 22-28, 2007)

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Since 2000 the science department at Khingansky Zapovednik has been studying the effects of the Bureiskoye Hydroelectric Dam and Reservoir (built on the Bureya River, a tributary of the Amur) on surrounding ecosystems and on Khingansky Zapovednik. When I first started talking to Slava about visiting Khingansky, he agreed that the reserve’s science staff could take me on an expedition to the Bureiskoye Reservoir in June. On June 22, we left for this expedition. Our company: Slava, Lyosha, Marina, Vitaly, a technician at the zapovednik, me, Robin, and Olga, a student from Birobidzhan studying the potential for development of recreation on the reservoir. (Picture: the zapovednik van (uazik) that took us to the reservoir and all our stuff (unloaded) -- good thing we weren't backpacking!)

Khingansky Zapovednik studies the reservoir together with the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Aquatic and Ecological Studies, based out of Khabarovsk. There are 6 sites on the reservoir where scientific research is being done on the influence of the reservoir, and Khingansky zapovednik is responsible for work at three of these sites. (Unfortunately, right now there are problems with getting research done at the control point, so comparison is difficult. ) Khingansky scientists travel to the Bureiskoye Reservoir 3-4 times a year, in spring, fall and winter, and most of their work focuses on counts of animal species – birds, large mammals, rodents. A book of articles was recently published about the effects of the Bureiskoye Dam and Reservoir, and estimates were made of the environmental damage, to what extent animal populations would decline (very significant declines expected, i.e. disappearance of 2/3 of populations), and so on. (Pictures: cool plants)

This scientific monitoring work is funded by the company that owns the Bureiskoye Reservoir. Interestingly, however, this is a different company than the company that owns the dam (i.e., the huge concrete structure) itself. This can lead to some interesting situations (of the sort you only come across in Russia). For example, on June 22 we had to cross the dam in our car to get to our research site. The owners of the dam didn’t want to let us through. They don’t talk to the owners of the reservoir, who are funding the research. On the day of our departure back to Arkhara, June 28, our driver had to cross the dam again to pick us up on the shore of the reservoir. But the dam was now closed until July 6. Nobody told us! (And our driver had no cell phone! Ultimately Slava walked quite a ways to get to the dam from the reservoir, walked across and dam and found our driver, while we took the motor boat with all our stuff to be picked up at another inlet, where the driver and Slava met us.) (Picture: Bureiskoye Reservoir)

The dam on the Bureya has been a project ever since the 1970s, although due to financial and political difficulties during the end of the Soviet era and the 1990s, it is only being completed today. The dam first began producing electricity in 2003 or 2004. There is another dam in the Amur Region, on another tributary of the Amur, the Zeya, that was built in the 1970s. Generally there are plans for quite a number of hydroelectric dams to be built in the next 2 decades on tributaries of the Amur River. (Hopefully, none will be built on the Amur itself, as that could be quite disastrous for the river’s ecosystems.) (Picture left: Robin, Marina, Olga preparing lunch)

Unfortunately, the presence of hydropower in the Amur Region does not mean cheaper electricity prices for the region’s residents. While consumers in Irkutsk, for example, pay less for electricity (there is a dam right in town), residents of the Amur region pay some of Russia’s highest prices for electricity. There is a suspicion that the electricity being generated by dams in the Amur Region, current and future, is going to China.

The most immediately visible effect of the dam is a “dead” zone of dead trees and wood extending several meters up along all shores of the Bureiskoye reservoir. It is fairly rough on the eyes. This dead zone appeared because the shores of the Bureya River were not logged before the dam began working. Overall, it is planned that water in the Bureiskoye Reservoir will rise about 20 meters above the original level of the river when the dam is operating at full power. (The dam is not at full capacity yet, and the dam owners raise the water level a bit more each year.) Theoretically this means that all the trees up to an elevation of 20 m above the level of water in the river should have been logged and cleared out before construction of the dam. They weren’t, and when the water level began to rise, the trees got drowned. (Pictures: dead zone, Bureiskoye Reservoir)

But, the water level in the reservoir doesn’t stay the same height year-round. In the fall, after summer rains, the water reaches its highest level (drowning new trees each year). Then the dam draws water from the reservoir through the spring – and as it draws water, it exposes dead drowned trees). At this time of year, in June, the water level in the reservoir is pretty low – it will fill up again when summer rains begin.

There used to be about 1700 roe deer inhabiting the hills around the Bureya River. It is estimated that a third of this population – 500-600 deer – drowned this winter in the Bureiskoye Reservoir! Although, no one is sure – it could be more, could be less. Roe deer can’t handle snow more than 70 cm high, and the snow reaches that level at the tops of the hills around the reservoir. So the deer more to lower elevations, and usually they would migrate across the iced-over river – they can’t stay trapped in a narrow zone along the shore. However, the river doesn’t freeze as well now due to the reservoir, and this year a lot of deer fell through the ice and drowned. (Pictre: Bureiskoye Reservoir)

After driving to the dam from Arkhara (about a 2-hour drive) and finally getting permission to drive over the dam, we took a 2-hour motor boat ride on the reservoir and made a camp. Russians are really good at camping, so we were not roughing it too much, to be honest. We had 3 4-person tents, and the guys made a wooden structure to put a tarp over, making a big tent for our groceries. We even had a wooden table with stumps for chairs. And, of course, when there are plenty of dead trees all around, there is no shortage of firewood. (Picture: our camp)

Lyosha had the main work on this trip – counting birds. In the spring and the fall Lyosha sets 14 nets for catching birds (12 10-meter nets for small birds, and 2 30-m nets for larger birds). He puts most of the nets in the “dead zone” of dead trees, because it’s interesting to see what birds might be using that area – they are taking a risk, since their young have to learn to fly before the water level rises and drowns the trees again in the fall. He also puts nets in the forest, of course. Lyosha is also interested in finding out how changes in the shoreline (like those that occur when you build a dam) affect bird populations. (Picture: Marina untangling net to catch birds)

It takes a long time – most of a day – to put up all the nets, and then Lyosha checks them several times per day. When a bird gets caught, Lyosha untangles it, brings it back to camp and weighs it, determines its sex and body fat, measures its beak, wings, and so on. He also tags each bird by putting a tiny metal ring on it. Even though most of the birds he catches are small sparrow-like birds, they can live 6-7 years, and Lyosha might catch them again.

Lyosha also goes on hikes to do counts by call (Lyosha can recognize 50-60 different species by their calls, which he claims really isn’t much of an achievement) and to register birds he sees (визуальные встречи). The coolest bird he caught at the reservoir while we were there was a nightjar (козодой). This bird has an amazing and loud call. It has a huge mouth and at night it flies with its mouth wide-open in order to catch insects. (Pictures: above: Lyosha removing a bird from the net; Lyosha and Marine taking measurements and recording)

Slava also took us on a few hikes around the reservoir, counting mammals by their scat. He is, um, quite the scat expert – he call tell you the animal, its sex, how fresh the scat is, what the animal ate, and so on. So although we did not see any bears, deer, hares, grouse, or elk, we did see what they left behind. We also saw quite a lot of tracks and even learned to distinguish them. (Picture left: Slava inspecting some bear scat as Robin looks on)

Our trip was not without its fun and amusement, of course! Navigating a motor boat through lots of tangled, partially sunken dead wood provided amusement of sorts in and of itself. We got leg massages from minnows in the reservoir’s shallows and went swimming in the reservoir – I even made it past a lot of the dead wood – being careful not to knock your legs on an unseen log – that can be painful – and out into real open water, where I could really swim. We told jokes and anecdotes around the campfire. We did our best for Olga to think of ways to develop recreation. (Snorkeling in underwater forests! Seriously though, obviously, the dead zone of trees would be a major factor limiting reaction potential. Otherwise, it’s a fairly pretty setting. Although there aren’t too many people in the near vicinity to recreate here, either.) (Picture: Slava tries to navigate through the logs with Lyosha and Marina's help)

Vitaly took advantage of one current form of recreation on the reservoir pretty well. There are plenty of pike in the reservoir (a species that wasn’t around in such large numbers before the dam), and Vitaly spent most of his free time fishing. He caught a lot of pike! So he and Slava decided they should smoke the fish. Now, to smoke fish you need a big barrel, kind of like a steel drum. We didn’t have a big barrel. “Don’t worry, we’ll find one!” says Slava. Robin to me: “How are they going to find a barrel?” Good point; after all, we are on a reservoir absolutely in the middle of nowhere. But they did find a barrel! And a bunch of hooks to hang the fish on inside the barrel. Don’t ask me… But after two says of smoking fish, we had plenty to take home from the expedition. Pictures: Vitaly, Ogla, Robin and Slava around the campfire; Slava preparing fish to be smoked)

* * *

After we returned from the Bureya on July 28, I got to go back into Khingansky Zapovednik and spend another weekend at the ranger station on Lake Klyoshenskoye. This time I lived in a room in the ranger station, not in a tent. Robin was also there, doing her vet school work on parasites in cranes. It seemed the real summer had now set in, and it was HOT! However, it is really quite scenic at the ranger station. Robin and I hiked in the heat to the site of the environmental education camp organized by the zapovednik, a few kilometers away in the buffer zone of the zapovednik, on Lake Dolgoe (in translation, “Long Lake” – the longest lake in the Amur Region, at 18 km long). We also went swimming and rowed around Lake Klyoshenskoye in the evening (I even got to try my hand at some rowing in a row boat), and we saw a number of herons and cormorants in the grasses along the shore (plus the swans kept at the Reintroduction Center). I went back to Arkhara on Sunday, July 1, spent another evening with Lyosha and Marina, and then headed to Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Region the next day. Pictures: Cormorant landing on Lake Klyoshinskoye; me learning to row

Birobidzhan (July 2-6)

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On July 2 I left Arkhara on a (very hot) 5-hour train ride to Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region (also right on the border with China). Not far from Birobidzhan is the zapovednik Bastak, created very recently, in 1997. Here as in Khingansky I learned about the activities of this zapovednik, got to meet the director and staff, and more. Of course, since I didn’t have as much time, I didn’t see things in as much detail, although I still collected enough info for a good impression. But I won’t repeat it all here – there is enough material for you, dear reader, about Khingansky!

I also got to tour around Birobidzhan a bit. It is a very green and quiet city. It has existed only since 1937, and there are only about 80,000 people here. (There are probably only 100,000 in all of the Jewish Autonomous Region.) Despite the name of the region, only 4% of inhabitants here are Jewish. However many signs are in both Russian and Yiddish! In Birobidzhan it was also very hot – sunny 95-degree days made me happy to return to cool and cloudy Vladivostok on July 7.

Pictures of Birobidzhan: 1. Monument to Chinese-Russian friendship; 2. Orthodox church; 3. Sveta, me and Nastya in front of the fountain at the philharmonic. Sveta and Nastya are university students doing summer internships in the environmental education department at Bastak. They develop lectures on various ecology and environmental-conservation topics that might be of interest to local schools and teachers. Sveta, Nastya, and another student, Anya, took me on a tour of Birbidzhan my first morning in the city.

Visit from another Fulbrighter (May 30 - June 2)

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From May 30 – June 2 I had a visit from another Fulbrighter, Danielle, which was really a treat. Danielle is a Russian and Chemistry double major from Duke, and for the last 9 months she has been working in a lab in Pushino, outside of Moscow. For the last couple of weeks Danielle has been doing a little traveling out east of the Urals, and she visited me after Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. We had a great time talking away and sharing experiences about the Fulbright, life in Russia, mentors, education, trains and more. After a day of downpour and plenty of clouds and chilly 50-degree temperatures the week before, we had some great weather for Danielle’s visit. Plus, I got to enjoy being a tourist in my own city, going to the Botanical Gardens outside of town, taking a trip to nearby Russian Island, checking out Vladivostok’s Hare Krishna restaurant, and strolling along the Amur Bay waterfront, which at this time of year has live music (singing), plenty of outdoor beer tents, kiosks selling real ice cream and souvenirs, and entertainers – a mime, a caricature portrait artist, and a very sociable monkey that takes pictures with the crowds. On Danielle’s last day they even turned the hot water back on in my apartment – ahead of schedule! What a lovely surprise.

Pictures: 1. Me and Danielle at the Vladivostok Botanical Gardens (maintained by the Russian Academy of Sciences Far Eastern Branch). It was beautiful there, although on the path through the forest we found a few too many ticks for our liking. 2. Kids on Russian Island. Russian Island is large island just a 45-minute ferry ride from Vladivostok, but very few people live there, and most of it is green and unsettled. It rather has the look of a military fortress zone abandoned by the Soviets – probably because it was. Formerly off-limits, today the island is visited by local tourists in the summer and is now one centerpiece for plans to develop the Far East. The Russian government hopes to host the Asian Pacific Economic Forum here in 2012, build a bridge from Vladivostok to Russian Island, construct a world-class aquarium (Russia’s first) on its shores, and more. We’ll see what the future holds!

Waterfall Hike (May 15, 2007)

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On this trip to the Lazovsky District Diana and Sergei introduced me to a friend of theirs, Oleg Nikolaevich Voronoi, and he immediately invited me on a hike the next day to some nearby well-known waterfalls, which also are protected as a nature monument, “Elamovsky Spring.” (Elamovsky is the name of the river you follow to the falls. From the “spring” in the name I conclude the river must have its source underground.) It was super nice of Oleg to extend the invitation. Hikes always make my day, and this was a good one.

The falls have a number of names, as far as I understand, so I’ll just choose one I like – Benevskiye waterfalls.

I went on the hike together with Oleg, his wife Galina Nikolaevna, her father Nikolai Alekseevich, and Elena Viktorovna, a teacher and employee of the Institute for Teacher Qualifications in Vladivostok, who was visiting Lazo to give a seminar for teachers there.

The whole waterfall and hike concept really reminded me of Oregon! Of course, after getting to see the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge it’s now hard to find landscapes that will impress me, which Oleg surely didn’t know, but these waterfalls were very nice, high and fairly impressive. Water is an amazing force in any case. Here there was actually an organized trail and everything. Today we were the only people on it, although it was beautiful weather and a great day for a hike. It is 12 km round-trip, and we started only at 4 pm, but this is okay, because it stays light out until 9:30.

Oleg is the Lazovsky District representative for the political party “United Russia,” which is by far the most dominant party in Russia. (They pretty much have no competition.) I had never met a Russian party representative before, so had no idea what to expect. However, Oleg is pretty cool, and I liked him. He has lived in the town of Lazo (pop. 3000-4000) his whole life, and his grandfather was the very first Russian resettled to Lazo in the early 1900s. Oleg used to be a school teacher and in the early 1990s founded an environmental organization dedicated to environmental education. He also has written some books and poetry for kids; he gave me one book as a present.

There is often a problem in Russia with visitors leaving trash on trails, in the forest, on beaches, etc. In short, there is not much of a “leave no trace” culture here. On this trail there were set areas to leave your trash, so there was less trash than usual on the trail itself, but still enough. Oleg picked up every piece of garbage he saw along the trail the whole way to the falls and back. This was pretty touching, actually. By the middle of the hike he had me picking up candy wrappers and bottles, too.

When the hike started it was plenty warm, and since spring was just beginning here, there was plenty of new green and flowers all around. This hike involved crossing a small yet rapidly-flowing mountain river (the Elamovsky) a number of times, and although the water was never too deep, there were plenty of rocks to complicate things. We were lucky that someone before us had made a lot of “bridges” across the river out of fallen trees. Although, I would still not call these crossings safe! Good balance definitely required.

Where we hiked is an area where tigers, sable and goral (an animal like a large black mountain goat) can certainly visit, which we could tell by the surrounding landscape (cliffs for the goral, for example; we also found sable scat) – but we did not see any wild animals (besides ticks, of course). We did get to see some really cool plants, particularly ferns and very pretty wild rhododendrons with lavender flowers. We also passed a handful of 500-700-year-old yew trees, a very unique tree here, which Russians also call “red tree” due to its red bark. (Despite their old age they were not too tall or enormously wide – yew trees aren’t.)

You gradually go uphill on this hike, and at the waterfalls itself – and particularly at the top of the falls – the end of our trip – there was actually still plenty of snow. Apparently in the winter the outside edges of the falls freeze over, but the water still runs through the center, and it sounds like music. Above these falls the river keeps going, and Oleg says there are another 25 waterfalls ahead, but of course, we didn’t have time to check out any more on this day.

Pictures: 1. Venevskiye Falls, 2. Spring is here! It was very green at the start of the trail. 3. A scenic view of the Elamovsky River (Spring), 4. A cool fern. We saw a lot of these on the hike, although I haven’t figured out what they’re called yet, 5. Oleg helped everyone out on river crossings (here with Nikolai Alekseevich), 6. view looking down at the river from the top of the falls, 7. there was plenty of snow above the falls, 8. some amateur photography going on – me at the top of the falls

Merganser Research in the Lazovsky District (May 11-17, 2007)

2007-05-21T20:31:00.001-07:00

Back in March one of the Institute of Marine Biology’s education specialists, Liliya, introduced me to a friend of hers, Diana Solovyova. Diana is a scientist at Wrangel Island Zapovednik (nature reserve), located way up north in the Arctic Circle. She studies marine ducks. Every year since 2001 Diana has come to the Lazovsky District, located about 200 km north of Vladivostok, together with her husband, Sergei, to study a rare duck species, the merganser (Mergus squamatus; in Russian, чешуйчатый крохаль). (Sergei is actually a geographer and expert on mammoths! He also works at Wrangel Island, and he and Diana have been working in the zapovednik system, and particularly in the Arctic, for their entire professional careers.)

Diana is super, and back in March she agreed that I could come spend some time with her and Sergei in the field. So I took my second trip out to Lazovsky District in mid-May (this time it was much greener than in mid-April!), and I not only got a chance to see Diana and Sergei’s work in the field, but also to talk with them about everything from science to education to politics to the zapovednik system. They are both fantastic people, and I had a great time.

About Mergansers and Diana’s Research

Mergansers are a rare species found only in the Russian Far East and Northern China; they winter in Korea and China. Nobody is exactly sure how many of these ducks there are left in the wild; estimates range anywhere from 2,000-10,000 individuals. 80% are in the Russian Far East. Why, you may ask, are scientists from the Arctic’s Wrangel Island studying this bird in the Russian Far East, when mergansers don’t travel to Wrangel Island? It turns out that if you study marine birds and you work in the Arctic, like Diana, you don’t have too much to do in the field before June, when the birds start to arrive for the summer. The Ministry of Natural Resources, which pays all zapovednik employees, is okay with employees from one zapovednik doing work in another zapovednik (in this case, Wrangel Island employees doing work for Lazovsky Zapovednik), as long as they’re not busy in their own reserve.

Because Diana does work on marine ducks, she has worked not only in the Russian Arctic but also in the places these birds migrate to – the U.S. (Alaska) and Northern Europe. She also knows English very well. Mergansers are an IUCN (World Conservation Union) Red Book Species (meaning they’re rare), so there is a lot of international interest in studying them, and people approached Diana. Since 2001 the research she leads on mergansers in the Primorye Region of the Russian Far East has been stably supported by a number of grants (from US Fish and Wildlife Service, etc.).

The location: Diana and Sergei work in 4 adjacent districts in the Primorye Region, but they do most of their work in the Lazovsky District. The field season: late March to late May. The last two years they have rented a house in Kishenyovka, a village of 240 people located in the Lazovsky District on the border of Lazovsky Zapovednik. (Diana estimates that of these 240 people, maybe 5 of them are employed. The rest don’t really seem to want to work, and how they spend their time was beyond Diana and Sergei. Obviously, they are a threat to the zapovednik, since they can easily cross into the territory and illegally fell trees, collect herbs, etc.)

The science team: Diana, Sergei, their field and equipment assistant, also Sergei, and Diana and Sergei’s very happy 3-year-old black lab, Joy, are constantly together. Valery Shokhrin, a Lazovsky Zapovednik scientist who is a specialist on predatory birds, also often joins them in the field. And then they have visitors like me, or like Tony, a marine birds specialist from Denmark who spent a couple of weeks in the field with Diana this year in late March-early April.

Mergansers nest in tree hollows on river banks, and a big part of Diana’s research focuses on studying places with changes in habitat, where trees along the river may have been chopped down. In the Lazovsky District a decent amount of forest along the rivers has been logged, and one hypothesis is that now there may not be enough nesting sites for mergansers here. Therefore Diana and Sergei have been putting artificial nests about 20 feet high up in trees since 2001. (These artificial sites either look just like wooden boxes, or like cylinders or wooden “tubes”.)

Sergei and Diana have placed a total of 140 of these artificial nests throughout the 4 districts where they work, with 45 in the Lazovsky District. In the Lazovsky District they find that about 30% of their artificial nests get used every year, and they assume that there are enough natural nesting sites for the rest of the birds. In the Olginsky District, for example – another of the 4 districts where they work – they find that only 5% of the artificial nests get occupied. Here there is just as much logging of the river banks as in the Lazovsky District, but there are not as many mergansers, so apparently fewer sites are needed.

Organizing the Field Season

Field work in late March starts with cleaning the artificial sites of litter and debris collected during the year, and in March and April Diana begins counting and tagging the adult birds as they return to the rivers of the Primorye Region. They catch the birds by putting nets up across the rivers.

At the end of April they start checking their artificial nesting sites to see if birds are using them. The also check the natural nesting sites that they know about. However, it is very difficult to find natural nesting sites, and they have only found 5 or 6 so far, all in the Lazovsky District, where they spend most of their time. (You have to spend a significant amount of time in a place to find the natural nesting sites – suitable little tree hollows are not necessarily easy to discover.)

Maybe you guessed it – checking the nests (and also putting up artificial nests) involves climbing trees. Sergei is an excellent tree climber. When they do the first check of nesting sites starting at the end of April, if they find a nest and a mother, they don’t catch and tag the mother at this time. This is very important! If there is a mother in the nest, she has most likely just recently laid her eggs. If they were to catch her, she would probably abandon the nest. Therefore they wait to catch and tag the mother until after she has made a significant commitment to the nest and won’t abandon it. During this first check, if a mother is there she will just fly away. Then Sergei will take out the eggs. They count the eggs and record the size and weight of each of them.

They also do a water test to determine how old the eggs are. They take an egg and put it in a jar of water. Eggs laid more recently are heavier and will stay at the bottom, where as older eggs are lighter and will float. They can actually estimate how many days old the eggs are. The eggs take 31 days to hatch, and therefore from the water test Sergei and Diana know by approximately what date the ducklings will hatch and, consequently, by what date they have to come back and catch the mother. (They have to catch the mother before the eggs hatch). Mergansers are like chickens – when they hatch, they are ready to go, and one day after their birth the mother will already have them out of the nest and on the water. They’re not like the typical songbirds in your backyard that spend a bunch of time in the nest getting fed by their mother after being born.

When I got to Lazovsky District on May 11 Diana and Sergei were at the stage of doing the second round of checks of their nesting sites. (I really hoped I might get to see ducklings! But the earliest would not start hatching until I was already getting ready to leave Lazovsky District.) From their late-April check Sergei and Diana already know at which sites there was a nest, and now it was late enough to catch the mother birds at those sites. At the same time the teams also does a second check of all the nesting sites, because it’s possible that a mother just hadn’t nested yet when they checked the first time around in late April. Sergei said last year they found a lot of new birds when they checked the second time around, but this year they have not found hardly anything – no mergansers, and just one mandarin duck nest in the Lazovsky District.

On my first day we went to an artificial nest where Sergei and Diana knew there was a mother and caught her. To do this Sergei (standing on the ground) puts a big net that is on a long pole up to the mouth of the nest; the bird senses a disturbance and flies out into the net. (Obviously, you have to be very quiet when you approach the nest.) Sergei and Diana had caught this mother already last year, and they had not only tagged her but also put a logger on her. The logger reads data about the bird’s surrounding environment (things like salinity, temperature, light and dark, etc.) every ten minutes nonstop, all year long. The loggers were used for the first time last year, and they put them on 8 birds. Nobody really knows where the birds go after they leave the Russian Far East for the winter, so they hope these loggers will provide a lot of useful new information. This was the second logger that they had managed to recollect this year for analysis.

Sergei and Diana weighed the bird, took off the logger and put a new one on her, and clipped a sample of her feathers from under her wing. This sample will be used to do a stable isotope analysis, which should help provide information about the time the bird spends at sea versus in fresh water environments. (Although no one can be certain that mergansers migrate to the ocean in the winter, it is generally assumed that they do.) This bird was incredibly calm; I was amazed.

Later in the afternoon we checked another artificial nest, this one in the shape of a box, rather than a tube. There were two mandarin duck eggs in it, which Diana weighed and measured. Interestingly, mandarin ducks lay one egg every day, usually for a total of about 10 eggs. (Since mandarins and mergansers often use similar nesting sites, Diana and Sergei take data on the mandarin ducks they find in their artificial nests, too. Generally mandarins prefer the boxes, mergansers the tubes, although both use both types.) Mergansers usually lay 10-11 eggs. Usually all of them hatch, but only about 60% then live after the ducklings move out to the river, as they get eaten by predators like eagles and mink. In the first winter it is likely that another 50% die, assuming they move out to sea, as the transition from a freshwater to a marine environment can be a tough one.

Mergansers often return to the same nesting site to hatch, but they’re not like salmon, so this is not required – they can certainly go to new places, although no one is sure how likely a scenario this is. However, Sergei and Diana have been concerned that in the course of their 7 years of work here, they have only come across the same birds (which they can identify because they have tagged them, of course) for 2 or at best 3 years in a row – and then they don’t see them again. This makes them think that mergansers may have a high mortality rate. Mergansers can live about 10-12 years and reproduce at 2-3 years. They survive well in captivity, and in Europe many are now being raised and studied in captivity. As you may have gathered, not enough is known about this rare bird – how many there are, where they migrate to, and more. Some research on mergansers using artificial nesting sites was done in the Russian Far East, and in the Lazovsky District, in the 1970s and 1980s. So Sergei and Diana’s work is not only really interesting and professionally done, but also very important.

Pictures: 1. Diana’s husband Sergei holding a mother duck that was caught on my first day; 2. and 3. the village of Kishenyovka; 4. An artificial nest (cylinder); 5. Sergei is checking the contents of an artificial nest (this one box-shaped); 6. Diana carefully removes the caught mother bird from the net; 7. Sergei takes the logger off the bird; 8. Sergei and I winding up the tree climbing equipment after Sergei had checked a nest; 9. Educational posters about mergansers, which get put up in a number of places in Primorye (e.g., Lazovsky and Olginsky Districts, Vladivostok, etc.)