Trekking in Kamchatka’s Wild – Part 2
I have never seen so many insects in my life. Tiny black flies, quarter-sized mosquitoes and enormous horseflies competed to distract Tatiana Indanova as she crouched at the edge of a spring-fed creek in the 90-degree afternoon heat, using one hand to collect aquatic insect larvae, or benthos, while swatting the biting insects with her free hand.
Tatiana is a 21 year old college student and member of the Even tribe from the remote, indigenous town of Anavgai, where she is universally known as “Tanyushka.” Many college students Tanya’s age would look forward to spending their summers in dance clubs or at a lakeshore resort or pretty much anywhere but a mosquito-infested wilderness crawling with bears. But for the third consecutive summer Tanya is using her free months to mount one- and two-week expeditions to remote waterways in Bistrinsky Natural Park on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, where she collects samples of aquatic insect life that she later analyzes at her university’s laboratory to detect changes in water quality. Tanya’s project is supported by a grant from the Lach Ethno-Ecological Information Center, which conducts an annual minigrants competition with Pacific Environment aid. I was fortunate enough to accompany Tanya on the first of this year’s expeditions, which had us visit a reindeer herders’ camp, cross high mountain passes, camp at a riverside fishing village, swim in natural hot springs, and twice get chased by bears.
Tanya is quiet and shy, but motivated and extremely intelligent, and her passion for science emerges in discussions about her work, where she uses both the Latin and Russian names of the various stoneflies and caddices caught in her nets. And, after conducting similar projects for the past several years, she is looking to expand in 2011, planning to travel on horseback to Kamchatka’s remote north to conduct training seminars for indigenous fishermen that live along remote rivers. She would also like to design a project to monitor the results of upcoming offshore exploratory drilling near the town of Kovran. “It’s not a complicated process,” she explained, “if we could just teach people how to do it, we could begin to establish a monitoring network.”
Tanya’s project has positive implications not just for environmental conservation, but also for Anavgai’s indigenous community. “What I like most about this project,” Tanya said to me as we sat around a campfire in a quickly constructed yurt on the last day of the expedition, “is that everyone is involved.” Indeed, her uncle, Kolya, a hunter and mountain man who stood down the two above mentioned bears, leads the expeditions, bringing along his teenage son Zhenya and other local kids to teach them how to build a yurt or set a net to catch fish. Occasionally scientists or researches from nearby Esso tag along to conduct their own research. Back in Anavgai, Tanya’s mother sewed the traps used to capture the benthos, and even local children occasionally tag along on less far-flung expeditions, using their small fingers to pull the tiny larvae off of the rocks.
Indeed, Kolya said it is this element that motivates him to participate. When I asked him why he helps out year after year, “My family is big,” he replied one night with typical understatement, “We support each other.”
Tags: communities, Fisheries, forests, Indigenous Life, Kamchatka, rivers, Russia, Russian Far East
