China Day 6: Jiading and Shanghai (May 3)

My last full day in China was another great one. In the morning Amanda and I went out of Shanghai to the town of Jiading. This was maybe my favorite day trip – it was a bit less touristy. The first place we saw in Jiading was the Quixia Garden, the estate of Gon Hong, who was the Ministry of Works for the Ming dynasty, built in 1502. Seems this guy had it pretty good. If he wanted he probably could have never ventured beyond his estate’s walls. This place was awesome, and the grounds were huge – you could get lost in them. The gardens were beautiful.

From the garden we walked through Old Town Jiading and then climbed another pagoda. Old Town and the new are literally right next to each other in Jiading – across from the square below the pagoda they were opening a new Walmart-like shopping center. From the top of the pagoda we could check out the Old Town and the new square below, where there were plenty of little amusements and rides for kids (holiday still going), and where they were very insistently playing Christmas music. According to Amanda the Chinese love Christmas music and play it all the time.

Next to the pagoda they had an amazing museum of wood and bamboo carvings, and after walking through Amanda and I decided to take a break and do some people watching in the square. I should mention that in China, like in Russia, they are big on selling individual ice creams from freezers on the streets. I had to try it – but somehow it’s not quite the same as in Russia. Must be that the weather’s not cold enough in China.

From the square we went over to the so-called Confucian temple, which was actually a rather long tour of the Chinese imperial examination system. Across the street from this temple you can go paddle boating on these funky paddle boats with Disney-like characters (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc.) on the front, and since I love to paddle boat, we had to do it. Actually it turned out that this was the best way to see the temples around the little lake. Although we were not the only paddle-boaters, we still got plenty of “Hellos!” shouted at us from the shore, and I suspect we may have been the subject of a number of photos. We just waved right back.

Amanda decided we would treat ourselves to a cab ride back from Jiading to Shanghai, rather than take the bus. This led to perhaps the most interesting experience of our trip. We got to the cab station and a seemingly very polite driver even opened the door for us to let us in. You have to take a round-a-bout driveway out of the cab station and stop to turn onto the main street. When our driver stopped, two Chinese motorcyclists drove up to the driver-side door and literally pulled our driver out of the cab and started beating him. Obviously, Amanda and I got out. Very fast. We were completely unharmed and never actually a target – apparently our cab driver had recently had an altercation with a cyclist. When we got out of the cab there were actually dozens of cyclists revving their engines and heading toward this cab driver. This guy was bleeding pretty well from the head by the time we drove past him in another cab just 3 minutes later. (They had already broken up the fight.) Amanda says fistfights fights are not necessarily uncommon in China, but she had never seen anything like this.

We had our drive back to Shanghai to recover, and then we got ready to go out for the evening. Shanghai has a couple of main streets that run perpendicular to the Bund and Huang Pu River. One of them is Nanjing Road, part of which is a pedestrian street. Tonight we walked down it. At night all the buildings on the pedestrian part are lit up until 11 pm. I have never seen this many lights in one place outside of Las Vegas or gambling/casino strips. There were a ton of people out, and there is also a little passenger train that runs down the center of the road.

From Nanjing Road we crossed over to Pu Dong and made it to the Pizza Hut in the Super Brand Mall after all. It really is a great view of the Bund and river. All of the buildings along the Bund are lit up until 11 pm, and there are also illuminated ships on the water. We had waffle fries and cheese-stuffed cheese pizza for dinner, which is totally disgusting, but when am I going to have that again in the next 7 months? (Actually, when have I had that ever…) We walked off a little of dinner by strolling along the embankment and checking out more lights, along with hundreds of other people. Since we were in Pu Dong, the east-side special economic zone, we were looking at the lights across the river on the Pu Xi side (west side), where Amanda lives. The lights in Pu Dong are also pretty awesome, and we could look back to get some idea of them, too.

We capped off our day and my trip with drinks at the Cloud 9 Bar on the 86^th floor of the Hyatt Hotel, from which you can look down on all the lights of Shanghai. From this high up everything looked small, even the lights of the supposedly tall buildings. I proposed that we bring a Russian tradition to China and do some toasts, which we enjoyed immensely. And of course we did the requisite reminiscing about Wellesley and the Fulbright. Who ever thought we would be where we are today? Certainly not us! Look, we’re American college friends who have to meet up in Shanghai for drinks, after all. We have been on some pretty incredible journeys over the past few years, and who can imagine what is waiting for us in the future, and what new and amazing adventures might lie ahead.

Pictures: 1. and 2. Quixia Gardens in Jiading, 3. teenagers in Jiading, 4. Confucian temple. In this temple there were statues representing Confucius’s 72 best disciplines, 5. and 6. Nanjing Road at night, 7. Bund and Pu Xi at night, 8. Pu Dong at night (the building with the spheres is supposedly just for show)

Lazovsky’s Annual Children’s Conference (April 20)

On my last day at Lazovsky I got to attend Lazovsky’s annual scientific conference for children living in the Lazovsky district, planned intentionally a few days before Earth Day. (Lazovsky Zapovednik sponsors a week-long celebration of Earth Day in district schools.) This conference has been going on for 12 years straight now. This year it brought together children from the towns of Lazo, Preobrazheniye, Kievka and Venevskoye. The zapovednik received about 50 papers from students in these towns and invited the authors of the best (probably about 25) to present aloud at the conference.

In the morning three types of work were presented: very short information pieces (usually an investigation of one species and usually by younger kids; the youngest kid there was 9); results of research; and papers. Some of the kids were really quite excellent speakers, and all of them listened to each other with very admirable attention. Although they rarely asked questions, when they did, they were very good ones! I found myself thinking that many adults would not be so attentive, interested and respectful. One girl gave a report on interviews she had done with local residents who had encountered an Amur tiger. Another girl had done research on different types of cedar trees. There were topics ranging from ancient peoples’ relationship with nature to rare butterflies to the importance of cedar trees. (WWF has involved many of these schools in a campaign called “Cedars are the tree of life!” – ultimately aimed at stopping logging of the species in the Far East.) In the afternoon there were creative presentations with songs and skits about nature (and especially about tigers!).

There were four judges of all presentations: one teacher each from Kievka, Preobrazheniye and Venevskoye, plus Galina Aleksandrovna from Lazovsky Zapovednik as the judge from Lazo. A first, second and third prize winner for each of the 3 types of morning presentations, plus the creative presentations, were selected, with the first prize winner winning an automatic ticket to spend three days at a camp for kids on Petrov Island in August. (Kids participating in this camp are all winners in contests that run year-long in Lazovsky District schools.) I thought the whole thing was great, but the environmental education department staff was a little disappointed with the results – a lot of the kids this year were younger and less experienced, and the best presenters had graduated last year. But that only means that each year these kids are going to grow and get better!

After the conference Galina Aleksandrovna, Olga, Sveta and Nadya invited me to go have a drink with them in the restaurant across the street. They were celebrating finishing the conference and the fact that it was payday. It was amazing to listen to them all talk. It seems like they know every kid in the Lazovsky District by name and personally. They also talked about how much they love Petrov Island and were anticipating the season on Petrov this year, which was to start in just a week. I asked if it is like a sacred place for them, like many say that Lake Baikal is, for example. “It’s more than that,” said Olga. “It is home.” I also asked them how they came to work at the zapovednik, a place where the average employee makes just 5000 rubles ($200) a month. (The average salary in Russia is about $400/month.) Galina and Sveta knew they wanted to come here, but Olga and Nadya noted that they came to the zapovednik because there was nowhere else to find work – and that most of the staff today are there for the same reason. Yet now Olga and Nadya have been there for 10 or 20 years already, and it certainly seemed to me that if they perhaps came to the reserve because there was nowhere else to go, they obviously found something they love there, because their enthusiasm for their job and attachment to this place is noticeable almost right away.

Pictures: 1. “Nature through the eyes of a child”: Sculptures made of shells made by kids living in an orphanage in Preobrazheniye (Zhenya works with them); 2. Kids listen to an informational report in the morning at the children’s scientific conference; 3. Kids doing a dance about the Amur tiger in the creative contest in the afternoon. These kids were rocking out!

Travel into the Zapovednik, Petrov Island Ranger Station (April 19)

I got to spend my second full day (April 19) taking a trip into Lazovsky Zapovednik. (The headquarters where I lived are not located inside the zapovednik but on the border, in the town of Lazo.) This was my first real trip ever to a zapovednik, and I was super psyched. Permit in hand, at 9 am I boarded the inspector (ranger) van – which looked something like an old Soviet military vehicle, with only two seats in the front and a couple short benches in the back – together with Zhenya from the environmental education department, who would be my escort of sorts for the day. Zhenya and I hit it off well, and I think she’s pretty fantastic. She’s about my age, with unbelievable red hair and the brightest green eyes I have ever seen, a 5-year-old son and a husband who apparently loves her to death. (As Zhenya says, he even understands the importance of building her a real nice toilet, so she doesn’t have to use the typical wooden outhouse facilities found in the Russian countryside.)

Lazovsky is surrounded by roads on all sides, and Lazo is on the northwest side of the reserve, almost at its northernmost tip. Our trip today would take us to an inspector’s station on the coast, in the southeast corner of the reserve. So we headed south from Lazo, driving all the time along the zapovednik border, with the reserve off to the left. You get the impression that the interior part of Lazovsky should be pretty inaccessible – forested peaks of 500-1000 m rise up one after another after another. The forests in Lazovsky are mostly secondary and not old growth – they’ve been logged before. Nonetheless, one of the reasons for the creation of this reserve was to conserve the unique broad-leaf forest ecosystems found here, and Lazovsky is the richest reserve in the Primorye Region in terms of flora, with 1284 species of plants found on the territory of the reserve. Lazovsky also has a few rivers – best known for their salmon populations (chum, pink, cherry) – running through the reserve territory and along its borders, the biggest of which is the Kievka. But unfortunately, not one full river system is contained fully inside the reserve, making complete protection of a whole watershed quite difficult – and if one part of a river gets polluted, or too many fish are caught in one spot, then obviously, the whole system suffers. The rivers we passed were all pretty shallow and probably not more than 100 feet or so across, and the water this time of year looks a little green-gray-bluish.

We made our first stop in the little town of Kievka (yes, you guessed it, Ukrainians were “resettled” in the Far East in the first part of the 1900s). Here Lazovsky has an affiliate office for inspectors. (The office is literally called a “forestry station” – “lesnichestvo.” (Lazovsky has a second lesnichestvo in the town of Preobrazhenye, on the Pacific Coast.) Here we met the director of the Kievka lesnichestvo, Sergei Nikolaevich or “Dyadya Seryoga” (“Uncle Sergei”), who has been working at the zapovednik for years. He has a very off-color sense of humor, particularly about the outdated ranger and inspector equipment that the zapovednik is still using (due to lack of sufficient funding). I liked him right away. Zhenya says every year, especially as the active summer season draws closer and the insufficiencies in equipment, gasoline and so on become more apparent, he threatens to quit – but never does.

On our way out from Kievka we got a truly scenic view of the very colorful Kievka town dump. (Lazovsky district, like many more remote areas in Russia, has difficulties getting waste properly carted away.) The road gets worse and worse from Kievka, until it enters the zapovednik itself, where it is completely a dirt road (more like a mud road at this time of year). Along the way we passed old and current pasture land. Zhenya explained that in her opinion the Chinese are much more successful at farming in the Russian Far East not because they better understand any regional agricultural and climatic particularities, but just because they work much harder than the Russians. When you get to the reserve itself the pastures end, of course, and the road is barred by an old metal gate and a sign saying “Territory of Lazovsky Zapovednik. Entrance is prohibited!” Our driver unlocked the gate and we drove through. At this time of year the scenery is pretty drab (last autumn’s brown leaves on the ground, no leaves yet on the trees, plus it was a grey day), but we saw dozens of sika deer, which was very exciting! Sika deer are an important prey species for the Amur tiger. To me they seemed pretty big for deer. Recent survey counts put the population of sika deer in Lazovsky at about 500-600 individuals. At this time of year sika deer are brownish-gray in color, but in the summer their coat turns brownish-red with very well-defined white spots.

After about a 30 minute drive our trip into the zapovednik ended as we hit the Pacific coast and our destination – one of Lazovsky’s 5 ranger stations, “Petrov Island,” located on the shore across from the island of that name, which is not at all far off the coast. Today was the day that they relieve the inspector at the station. The facilities here at “Petrov Island” consist of the ranger station itself, one bigger building with a room for environmental education lectures and a room for visitors to stay overnight, and 6 small (2-room) cottages for summer visitors, which are usually already reserved for the summer 6 months to a year in advance. These cottages are not located on the territory of the reserve but right beside it, and the land is rented by the zapovednik, which provides services to the visitors for a small fee. We also got to meet the new dog in town at the ranger station, a very excited puppy who jumped all over us. They say the dogs at the Petrov Island ranger station don’t often make it too long before they are dragged off by one of the dozen or so Amur tigers inhabiting the reserve territory, who seem to have a weakness for canines, as Zhenya likes to say. The cat at the ranger station, named Kasyan, is doing quite well, however. He even used to have favorite zapovednik visitors – a German scientist and his students who study birds at the reserve. Unfortunately, the Germans often would find the nets they had set for birds were emptied by Kasyan before they got a chance to do any research about the feathered friends they’d caught.

While the inspectors took care of things at the ranger station, Zhenya and I walked around a little bit, collected some of the shells that wash up in large and very colorful numbers on the shore and checked out some very old tiger tracks in the sand. Right on the water you can see all kinds of seaweed right in the fairly clear waves – I’ve never seen seaweed in such quantity in the States. Zhenya told me a little bit about why nearby Petrov Island is so famous around here. It is home to the only grove of yew trees on the Sea of Japan, and the trees are 500 or more years old. Moreover it is an architectural monument of sorts – the theory is that ancient cultures lived here about 1500 years ago, and many artifacts have been found here. Although the island is not that big, and there are no rivers, there are 3 underground aquifers that are sources of water. According to legend natural springs on the island are a source of beauty and youth, and Petrov Island is also rumored to be one of the last places defended by Ghengis Khan. But of course the real magic of Petrov Island must be created by how people feel when they visit it. They say that the visitors to Petrov Island today create their own legends about the place. Lazovsky allows 3000 visitors annually to Petrov Island between May and September, and they walk a path around the island accompanied by two members of the reserve’s environmental education department. Petrov Island is essentially the only place in the reserve where visitors are allowed (with a couple of small exceptions). This little bit of visitation, combined with other PR activities of the reserve, which puts out some publications and has a regular segment on regional TV, makes Lazovsky one of the most well-known natural places in Primorye. Many residents of Vladivostok talk about how beautiful Lazovsky is, how lucky I am to get to visit there.

When we drove away from the ranger station it had already started raining. Our day took us also to Preobrazheniye, a fishing town of 12,000 that is surrounded by the reserve on all sides. (This creates some opposition among the local population, since entering the territory of the reserve is prohibited – many residents see the reserve as a threat and as something that limits where they can go to vacation. Lazovsky just opened a new education center here to help raise awareness and support among Preobrazheniye residents.) We then made it back to Kievka and finally back to Lazo, already in the evening. I realized on the way home that I had forgotten at the ranger station the shells I collected on the shore across from Petrov Island. Zhenya says that is a sign that I will have to come back. I sure hope so!

Pictures: 1. Me in front of the Lazovsky Zapovednik sign at the Petrov Island ranger station; 2. (left to right) Ranger station, environmental education building and cottages across from Petrov Island; 3. Petrov Island on a rather dreary day

The Town of Lazo (April 18)

After spending my first day chatting and consulting away in the zapovednik headquarters, I decided to take a little walk around the town of Lazo, which has a population of about 3000 people. All the zapovednik staff live here. The Russian countryside towns I have been to in the past have been a lot smaller. So I discovered that you cannot actually walk around an entire town of 3000 people in 2 hours, the amount of daylight I had left at the end of my day! But it was really nice to see Lazo and breathe some fresh air. Almost all of the town is paved, and many of the residents are government officials, since Lazo is the district capital for the Lazovsky district. Lazo is surrounded by hills about 500 m high, many of which still had snow on them. It is so nice to walk around Russian towns like this in the evening – even the smells are familiar. (Hello, wood and leaf burning! But somehow, in the country and in the fresh air this is almost comforting.) Lazo has a lot of one-story old wooden houses, as well as some 4-story Soviet-style apartment complexes. Unlike many of the (much smaller) villages I’ve been to in Siberia, Lazo did not have any cows wandering the street. In fact, there used to be 10,000 head of cattle in the Lazo area, but today there are less than 900, and there are surprisingly not that many vegetable gardens, livestock, etc. in Lazo – I’m not sure if this is a sign of generally more challenging agricultural conditions in the Far East, or what is the reason. Thus although you expect that people in the countryside would always be eating some kind of fresh, homemade food, that’s not the case in Lazo, where people apparently buy a lot of conserved and packaged stuff.

If Lazo doesn’t have cows on the streets though, it makes up for it with dogs! There might be as many dogs in Lazo as people (ok, not really) – and they have some fierce barks. They are made up for by the general friendliness of kids in the country, though, almost all of whom will say “hello” to a new and unknown face on the street.

Pictures: 1. Lazo and hills in the background; 2. A tree in Lazo with a parasitic mistletoe species attached (those are the things that look like spheres of leaves) – I’ve noticed a number of trees with this parasite; 3. A house in Lazo.

Meeting the Lazovsky Staff and Learning about Main Acitivities (April 18)

The day starts early at Lazovsky Zapovednik headquarters. Before 8 am on my first day, April 18, doors were already opening and closing, and footsteps resounding through the hallways. When I made my way to the reserve director Aleksandr Laptev’s office at 9, he was already finishing a meeting with his inspectors. The two of us chatted about the latest news at Lazovsky, which is currently in a battle with the local district administration and a private company “Tis.” (“Tis” means “yew tree” in Russian.) The situation: Lazovsky has had a lot of success in the past few years renting from the local administration a small piece of land on the Pacific coast. This land is not formally part of the Lazovsky Zapovednik but borders it and is considered a buffer zone, and Lazovsky provides conditions for a very limited number of tourists to vacation here in the summer, at a very modest price, without harming the surrounding environment. This has allowed the reserve to make a little bit of extra money, as well as to propagandize environmentally friendly tourism and acquaint visitors with the beauty of the region and the importance of conserving it. This year the local administration decided not to renew the reserve’s lease on this land and instead awarded it to Tis, which intends to build private cottages on the shore, making it effectively off-limits to visitors and potentially increasing violations of reserve regulations significantly. Lazovsky is fighting this decision with every means it can – from the Ministry of Natural Resources in Moscow to the Primorye Regional Administration to mass media campaigns to going to court.

After my talk with Laptev, today I got to meet staff from each of the three main departments at the zapovednik: nature protection, scientific research and environmental education.

Environmental Education
We started with a tour of Lazovsky’s nature museum and ecocenter, and a chance to talk with all of the environmental education department’s staff. They have 5 people at headquarters in Lazo and a few more in towns around the zapovednik. The staff in Lazo: Dima, the deputy director for education; Galina Aleksandrovna, head of the ecocenter; Olga; Zhenya, whose parents were infamous as Lazovsky, her mom as former head of the ecocenter and her dad as deputy director for science, and who left for a year to work at WWF’s leopard center to the west of Vladivostok; and Sveta, the youngest and newest staff member, who went to a beach near Lazovsky last summer and decided this is where she wanted to be. They are all incredible enthusiasts; you feel like they could take on the world.

At Lazovsky, like at most Russian zapovedniks, the environmental education department has only existed since 1995 – under the Soviet system reserves had almost no interaction with the local population. Lazovsky’s guiding principles in modern times are to process very strictly the violations that are currently occurring in the reserve, and to very actively educate young people so that these violations won’t occur in the future. The environmental education staff don’t limit their activities to the territory of the reserve but work extensively with residents of several towns bordering the zapovednik and with all ages, from pre-school (Zhenya’s responsibility) to primary and middle-school (Galina and Olga) to high school (Sveta). They have developed an entire environmental education curriculum and workbook for primary schools that has been enthusiastically implemented by teachers across the Lazo district, and the reserve staff conducts special complementary lessons on particular themes agreed upon with local teachers. With all their activities the reserve staff alone spends at least one day a week in the classroom. Moreover they conduct a number of events in Lazovsky headquarters: children are welcome at activities and clubs in the ecocenter, Galina organizes an “environmental theater” group, and for 12 years running now each April there is a big children’s conference held in the headquarters with children from several local towns, who present results of independent research they’ve conducted and also participate in an artistic program (song, dance, acting and more!). The zapovednik organizes a year-long contest with various components and events for local school children, and the winners spend 3 days on Petrov Island in the summer.

Petrov Island is the second piece of Lazovsky’s environmental education work. From September to May the reserve staff is busy with local schools, but in the summer work shifts to Petrov Island, one of two islands belonging to the zapovednik, where visitors can walk a loop trail on a very controlled guided tour with reserve staff. Only 3000 visitors are allowed each year, as the reserve has determined that more would cause harm to surrounding ecosystem.

Of course, the reserve also conducts tours for visitors at the nature museum in the zapovednik headquarters in Lazo – Zhenya’s job.

In the evening I got to talk more with Galina Aleksandrovna about the reserve’s education work, and I realized how she is a natural teacher and mentor, not just from the way she enthusiastically talks about her work, but also from her general interaction in conversation – she doesn’t interrupt, encourages questions, both talks and listens with great enthusiasm, and more – her whole manner is so respectful and intelligent. I realized how much I admire people like her, who really are too much a rarity, and how much I value these qualities.

Galina and I were also joined in the evening by Laptev, who brought me my permit to enter the territory of the reserve the next day. You can’t just enter the territory of a zapovednik without special permission. Laptev is a very smart director, and he expects you to be sharp too, but it is obvious that he also is close with his staff and respects them. We sat with him and chatted about his education and experiences at Lazovsky, and his trip to the States in 1996 (he has been to Denali and Olympic National Park – something many Americans would envy!). He came to the Russian Far East from Ukraine, and he has been working at Lazovsky for 35 years – he knew he wanted to work here ever since coming for summer field work as a student in 1970. I can’t help thinking how it is amazing the fascinating and talented people I get to meet, and what conversations I get to have. Who knows what the future could hold!

Nature Protection
The biggest problem confronting almost all Russian nature reserves is simple violations – something we are not so used to in the United States. This might be organized criminal poaching, as in the case of the “fish mafias” that poach salmon on Kamchatka, or it might be individual locals just looking for a means for subsistence. The latter is more characteristic for Lazovsky, although ultimately, all of these violations result from a lower standard of living in Russia – many people live quite poorly and so are willing to risk violations, and perhaps even their lives, and enter a wild territory. The nature protection department at Lazovsky is the biggest at the reserve, with about 70 full-time employees, 3 offices – one at headquarters in the town of Lazo, and two in other towns bordering the reserve, in Kievka and Preobrazheniye – and 5 ranger stations throughout the reserve, where inspectors (rangers) live year-round – they man these stations on 7-10 day shifts. Up until 2005-06, Lazovsky rangers were divided into patrols that would inspect an assigned section of the reserve with a given ranger station as their home base – the whole reserve was divided into a few of these sections, and this way the idea was that everything would get covered by one patrol that would work that section for 10-20 days. Unfortunately today the reserve doesn’t have enough money even for the gasoline needed to get these inspectors around, and now they can only fund such operations for a day or two.

Nonetheless Lazovsky is considered one of the most successful reserves in terms of nature protection, and not without reason. The zapovednik is very strict with violations. Every offense is officially and legally written up and reported – a great rarity in Russian parks – even if the violator is no longer on the scene. Moreover Lazovsky makes it a priority to make sure that fines levied are actually collected – even more of a rarity. Nadya, the woman who is responsible for processing violations at the office in Lazo, will hunt down violators and call and visit them repeatedly – 86% of fines levied at Lazovsky are paid, even if it takes years for the violator to pay them off. Nadya told me about one woman who got fined 650 rubles – about $25. She has been paying it off in 50 ruble increments for the past 3 years (“but she will pay it all!” adds Nadya). Moreover, Lazovsky takes serious offenders to court – 4 people were taken to court last year, for things such as collecting very large quantities of nuts, killing an animal, etc. – and recently they have been successful in raising the minimum fine from 500 rubles to 1000. (Repeat offenders pay more.) Recently the reserve has noted a decline in the number of violations, although the figure is about 100 violations per year. Types of violations include things like collecting herbs, hunting, fishing and setting fires on the territory of the zapovednik, as well as simply entering the territory without permission, often to vacation.

Scientific research
Science at Lazovsky, like in many reserves, has taken a bit of a hit since Soviet times, when things like large-scale research and helicopter expeditions for counts of various species were funded annually, and staff received much better salaries. Today there are less than 10 permanent scientists at Lazovsky, and they have positions they can’t fill (for example, for a botanist and a GIS specialist). The reserve has succeeded in conducting only one helicopter flight in the last 20 years. However, the biggest advantage to science at the zapovedniks is that it is conducted constantly and year-round, providing for a lot of consistency.

Today there are 3 main areas of scientific research at Lazovsky. The first is the so-called “nature chronicles,” which are conducted at every reserve. This is basically an inventory (although the reserve considers it monitoring) and count of what species are observed in the zapovednik, and which aren’t – every time a staff member comes across a given species, he notes it. They don’t monitor every single species – the list is divided into ten sub-categories (such as mammals, birds, plants, etc.) with a number of representatives selected for each sub-category – but still, the list is quite extensive. The data collected through this inventory/monitoring work at Lazovsky goes back about 60 years now. All these data are written up in huge annual reports, and there is always more information if the reserve has on staff an expert in a given category – if not, then there is just the minimum information necessary for the chronicles. This year the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources is working on developing a set of standards on monitoring work and the zapovednik nature chronicles – refining the system, you might say.

The second area of scientific work at Lazovsky is focused on studying individual species (for example, the Amur tiger, ungulates, mergansers) and the relationship between them and surrounding ecosystems. Every 5 years the scientist conducting this kind of research must put together a list of recommendations for protecting the given species both in the zapovednik and generally, and these recommendations are sent to the Primorye Regional Administration Department of Natural Resources (where they are usually ignored, or if not, then often interpreted as is most advantageous to government officials).

Finally, Lazovsky is working to develop a third area – forecasting. First and foremost this requires analysis of all the data collected in the nature chronicles. Right now the reserve is working to get all of these data into a unified computerized database which will then allow for real analysis, on the basis of which they can create models and prognoses for the future. But at minimum they expect this will take 5 years – right now Lazovsky does not do any modeling or forecasting work.

Lazovsky collaborates with scientific institutes, other reserves (such as Wrangel Island Zapovednik – merganser research) and NGOs (such as the Wildlife Conservation Society – tiger research) if the research that these organizations propose is of interest to Lazovsky. The reserve has the same policy for hiring scientific staff – theoretically, scientists can’t just research whatever they want (sometimes a problem in Russia), but should propose topics to the reserve and gain its approval, reaching some kind of mutual agreement.

Picture: Kids enjoying the Nature Museum at Lazovsky Zapovednik headquarters

The Trip to Lazo (April 17)

I left Vladivostok on a 5-hour bus-ride to the town of Lazo, home to the main offices of Lazovsky Zapovednik, at 5:50 pm on April 17. Even in April it stays light out until about 9 pm, and I was very excited to have a window seat and get my first view of nature outside of Vladivostok, including passes through forested hills – with trees still bare from winter – marshes and meadows, local towns and fresh air.

If you want to get an impression of the “real” Russian people, one way is to take the bus – particularly for long distances. The bus can be interesting. The seats are not what you might call comfortable, or clean – although they are cushioned – and even though you are traveling for 5 hours or more, there is no bathroom on the bus. This is okay, though, because the bus stops frequently, about every hour, either to make a scheduled stop or, in our case, if there was no scheduled stop within an hour, then our driver just pulled over on the side of the road, and as if on cue, all the men piled out of the bus to have a cigarette. (Outside of Vladivostok, there are not too many other cars on the roads in the sparsely populated Primorye Region.) My neighbor on this trip was a fisherman named Sergei who had just today returned from a 3-month stay at sea. He had also just purchased a new cell phone. And after 3 months at sea, he was of course quite talkative. Therefore he spent most of the trip, whenever there was a connection, calling his friends and family and talking to them very loudly, just in case the rest of the passengers on the bus had forgotten that he just got a new cell phone today. When he couldn’t get a connection, he talked to me about his adventures at sea (including witnessing how killer whales surround seals and teach their young to hunt), about seeing a tiger at camp in his childhood, adventures in China and, most of all, about the importance of me giving him my phone number, an invitation I somehow managed to turn down.

I arrived in Lazo at about 11 pm and was directed to the zapovednik headquarters, where the night guard let me in to the room where I would be staying – a super nice single, complete with a TV and mini-fridge, for which the zapovednik director charged me only $8 a day, although it usually goes for about $25. There were no other guests at this time of year, though. Tomorrow I would spend the day at the zapovednik headquarters, meeting staff and touring the museum, visitor’s center and library; on Thursday I would head out for a day trip into the zapovednik, and on Friday I would get to attend an annual conference for local children.

Picture: My room in the Lazovsky Zapovednik headquarters building in the town of Lazo.

Lazovsky Nature Reserve (April 17-21, 2007)

On April 17 I took my second out of town trip since beginning the Fulbright – to Lazovsky Zapovednik, located about 200 km (a 5-hour bus ride) north of Vladivostok. A “zapovednik” is a strictly-protected nature reserve, where the only activities allowed are scientific research, environmental education and nature protection (mostly processing violations). No tourism. The zapovedniks in Russia fall into the World Conservation Union’s Category 1 for strictest protected nature reserves. The first Russian zapovednik was created in 1916 (Bargunzinsky, on Lake Baikal), and today there are 101 zapovedniks in Russia. Lazovsky was originally created in the 1930s as an affiliate of Sikhote-Alinsky Zapovednik (further north in the Primorye Region). It provides protection for several rare and threatened species: the Amur tiger, sika deer, and the goral, which looks kind of like a large black mountain goat. Today Lazovsky is considered one of the most successful nature reserves in Russia, particularly in terms of its environmental education and nature protection activities.

I was lucky enough to meet the director of Lazovsky Zapovednik, Aleksandr Laptev, in February on Kamchatka, and in March he invited me to the town of Lazo, on the border of the reserve, where the zapovednik headquarters are located. I lived at the zapovednik headquarters for 3 full days (April 18-20) and got a first inside look at the way the reserve works. At the end of my trip, we preliminarily agreed that I will come back to Lazovsky Zapovednik at the end of July to spend 10 days working with the reserve’s environmental education staff on Petrov Island, one of the most well-known natural places in the Primorye Region.

Picture: The sign for the Lazovsky Zapovednik main offices and nature museum and visitor's center. Since this sign is located on the main road running from Vladivostok through the Primorye Region, the reserve's museum and visitor's center get a number of visitors who are just passing through. The museum is considered the second most successful nature museum in Primorye, with over 4000 visitors each year.