#4
Baltimore Sun
November 4, 2001
Turn of seasons, terns of the sea
Ornithologist: Decades spent at a remote nature reserve have left a scientist
more in tune with Arctic birds than with the tourists the Russian government
wants to send him.
By Will Englund
KANDALAKSHA, Russia - It has been 50 years since Vitaly Vitalyevich Bianki first traveled to the islands of Kandalaksha Bay, and over the intervening decades he has made his mark so strongly on the Arctic bird sanctuary here that it is now impossible to think of it without thinking of him.
He is the man to see if you want to know about the Arctic tern, which flocks here by the thousands in a yearly migration that stretches from the Antarctic to the Arctic. And goldeneyes? There's nowhere else to go but to the island headquarters of the refined and intellectual ornithologist who at 75 still makes them his life's work.
Kandalaksha, in the northwest corner of the White Sea, plays host every year to hundreds of thousands of birds - not only terns and goldeneyes but also eiders, oystercatchers, guillemots, sandpipers, white-tailed sea-eagles, ospreys, peregrine falcons, great cormorants, willow ptarmigans, black grouse and herring gulls.
It is home to some, a summer way station for others. It was the Soviet Union's first nature reserve. And, for the past half-century, it provided a refuge of another sort for a man like Bianki.
For 40 years he worked here out of harm's way while the Soviet experiment flared and collapsed. For 10 years he kept on working while a peculiarly criminal form of free enterprise gripped the rest of the country.
In 1951, when the slender graduate student first rowed himself out to the little island of Devichya Luda, Soviet biology was still in thrall to Trofim Lysenko, a favorite of Josef Stalin whose theories contradicted the generally held scientific belief in heredity.
Stalin still had two more years to live. Russian universities were stuffed with Communist Party theorists and were settings for Communist Party interference in professors' time and studies - and that didn't change until the end of the 1980s.
Academic life, particularly in biology, consisted of a great deal of what the Russians call yerunda - nonsense.
So Bianki, the son of a beloved illustrator of nature books and the grandson of pre-revolutionary Russia's foremost ornithologist and entomologist, took himself far to the north, to a place of quick, cold currents, where hundreds of islands - some in forest, some in tundra - sprout carpets of berries.
In Kandalaksha this old-fashioned St. Petersburg intellectual found hills rolling down to the clean waters of the bay, fish jumping and mosquitoes biting - and he found very few people and no commissars at all.
Having a background like Bianki's could be dangerous in proletarian Russia, especially considering that, as he puts it, he somehow missed out on the Komsomol, or Young Communist League, and never came close to joining the party. Kandalaksha took him in.
Today Bianki is white-haired, still slender, spry, courtly, hospitable but impatient when he senses that time is being wasted. That might come from living in a part of the world where the tide runs strong and can drop nine feet, where procrastinators and slowpokes who visit other islands run a real risk of getting stranded.
Summers, Bianki directs groups of students from his command post at the "white house," a two-story wooden cottage on Ryazhkov Island. The wind blows in off the harbor, scooting up under the pines. The sun circles lazily overhead, never setting at all for a good part of June and July.
"My scientific interests," Bianki is saying, "are satisfied much better here than they could have been anywhere else." Winters, he lives ashore, in town.
He came here originally from Leningrad while working for a biologist named Valentina Kulachkova who was studying parasites of the common eider. His job was to get the eider - with a shotgun.
"That was when the rules here were much less strict," he says.
He continued to come here summers, and in 1955, with his degree in hand, he moved up here for good with his wife. At that time the nature reserve had one boat available - a rowboat. So Bianki began his studies on Devichya Luda, a little sweep of an island, because it was only slightly more than a mile away. But it also happens to have the most diverse population of birds in the White Sea.
Bianki wrote what became a famous monograph on sandpipers, seagulls and black guillemots of Kandalaksha Bay, and eventually he got a motorboat.
Life has always been Spartan here, because governments have come and gone but none has ever devoted many resources to out-of-the-way nature reserves that no one ever sees.
It has been a life of constant scrimping and improvisation, but not loneliness. Year after year, graduate students came up to work with him, and undergraduates, even high school students.
Bianki's task, as he saw it, was to compile long-term data, to watch populations in flux, to try to see what was going on.
The number of ducks is going down as the number of herring gulls goes up. Black grouse had been flourishing here after a big fire wiped out old-growth forest in the 1930s, but now as the forest ages again their numbers are declining. But not the capercaillies - they prosper in an old pine woods.
His two real loves are the goldeneye and the Arctic tern. The population of goldeneyes - ducks that feed on mollusks - has declined in the past 10 years, even though the number of adults coming here to molt has increased, and it's not clear why.
The Arctic tern, he says, is the "sunniest" bird, because it flies 20,000 miles every year to enjoy summer first in the Arctic and then in the Antarctic. He admires their good looks and even dispositions.
Bianki calculates that 150,000 birds have been banded in Kandalaksha in the past 50 years - at one point, he and his students were doing 1,000 Arctic tern fledglings a day.
A nature reserve in Russia - called a zapovednik - is not like a national park. The public is prohibited. There is no camping. Poachers face arrest, if the undermanned patrols can catch them.
And Kandalaksha is a nature reserve specifically for birds; so when a fox crosses the ice to one of the islands and, come springtime, begins feasting on mottled green eider eggs in their downy nests, Bianki does not let nature take its course. He goes out to shoot the fox.
Kandalaksha is not, in any case, the deep wilderness. Much of the surrounding mainland has been lumbered at one time or another. Small freighters laden with apatite, mined nearby and used in fertilizers, run up and down the bay. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were silver mines on Medvezhy Island, kept secret from the distant czar.
Now the zapovednik, as usual strapped for cash, has been told by Moscow to work out a plan to attract tourists to Kandalaksha. Alexander Chavgun, the director, says the zapovednik has to start taking on an educational role or it will be doomed. That means bringing people here to be educated.
Bianki thinks letting tourists come here is fine - as long as they're confined to a boat and don't set foot on any of the islands. But that's not a vision that a ministry official in Moscow is going to entertain for very long.
Some sort of plan is going to have to be worked out. Hotels might have to be built, and boats bought. Roads might have to be cut through along the mainland shores of the bay. No one can say for sure that development will not ruin Kandalaksha.
"And to organize this would cost a lot of money," Bianki points out, suddenly brightening at the thought. Because who, after all, has any money these days? Poverty might be the last refuge.
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