I’m a wildlife conservationist and I work in Russia. Here is a tiny example, from that corner of the world that shows how maintaining a grounding in scientific principles benefits both humans and wildlife.
Ternei County (in the Russian province of Primorye) is remote, forested, and sparsely populated. There are few opportunities for steady employment here, with the logging industry being one of the few exceptions. In fact, a single logging company acts as the primary employer in at least four of the ten villages scattered across this 11,000 square mile area.
Over the past thirty years, more and more of Ternei County have been opened up for timber harvest, driven by global demand, with logging roads reaching further and further into these forests of pine, oak, and birch.
As a wildlife conservationist I was concerned that poachers were using old logging roads to shoot deer, wild boar, and even tigers, but intuition was not enough to guide change in logging management practice. The forests appear vast and limitless to anyone passing through them, so how can I measure the impact of logging roads?
In 2011 I was asked last minute to give a plenary talk about Amur tigers at a conference in Ussuriisk, Russia. Unfortunately, when I received this request I was twenty kilometers from the closest highway, and the conference was in only a few days.
I was volunteering at the time at an isolated Amur leopard trapping camp in southern Primorye, Russia, where scientists were putting radio collars on a few of these critically-endangered cats to better understand their movements. I was there as an extra pair of legs to hike up and down the steep slopes to reach the trap lines, and as an extra pair of ears to monitor the trap transmitters through the night in case of a midnight capture.
My boss, through the muffled static of a satellite phone, laid out the plan for the talk: I would walk the twenty kilometers to the highway, where a colleague named Andrei would meet me. The closest town to my location, called Nezhino, was small and only had a few stores. Andrei was to meet me at the one right next to the highway. He’d have a USB flash drive containing the presentation and would drive me sixty kilometers to Ussuriisk in time to deliver the talk.
I woke at dawn on the designated day, zipped out of my tent, and hit the trail early. I was tracing the same route I’d followed to reach the leopard camp so it was familiar, but I hesitate to call it a road. Yes, vehicles can travel on it, but it’s not something I would recommend. Napoleon Bonaparte noted that “in Russia, there are no roads: only directions in which one travels,” an 18th century quote apt in this case. The road was a muddy network of intersecting, waterlogged ruts where, if you didn’t know exactly which fork to follow, you were guaranteed to get your car stuck.
For conservation biologists, not all adventures take place in the woods. Sometimes the pathways to be negotiated are hallways, not game trails. Sometimes our adventures are urban.
In March 2015 I went to a clinic in Vladivostok for the first of a three-shot series to vaccinate myself against tick-borne encephalitis. This disease is a serious matter: one bite from an infected tick can lead to seizures, hallucinations, and even death.
Rather inconveniently for me—someone who works deep in tick country in Russia but who spends only a quarter of the year there—none of the few vaccines that exist are available in the United States. The Center for Disease Control somewhat unhelpfully suggests using “insect repellents and protective clothing” when in infected-tick habitat, which is useless advice for a place where I remove upwards of forty ticks from my body a day during the peak season. Eventually, one of them bites. So, when my last vaccination wore off, I had to carefully plan a series of trips to Russia that would also match the wait times between the three vaccine doses.
Arriving in Vladivostok for the start of my 2015 field season studying Blakiston’s fish owls, I located the clinic quickly: an unassuming, hundred-year-old complex of low brick buildings up the hill from the main square in town. None of the doors were marked so I picked one and stepped inside as though into an unknown forest. After guessing my way through a confounding series of hallways I dead-ended at a half-dozen people standing about, looking bored.
It wasn’t clear if I was in the right place, but a man suggested I ask in Room Number Six about the vaccine I needed. The doctor there told me to wait my turn with the others in the hall.
Someone freshly arrived in Russia might walk into a bank or clinic like this and be pleased to find a mere handful of people ahead of them in line – only to discover that as one stands and waits, people materialize out of thin air to occupy positions ahead. Lines in Russia are often spatial rather than linear. The trick is to wonder aloud who is last in line, make eye contact with whomever responds, and then pass this unseen baton to the next person who arrives and inquires as you did. With your link in the chain firmly tethered on both sides, you can briefly leave the waiting area knowing your place is secure.
I asked who was last in line and signed an invisible social contract with a gentleman in an argyle sweater. I was eventually ushered into Room Number Six, which as it turned out was simply a reception area where my request for a vaccine was assessed. The stern doctor behind a desk recorded my name and place of employment before she took my temperature.
Satisfied that I was healthy, she instructed me to find the automatic payment machine in another of the clinic’s buildings, then return with proof of payment for the shot to present at Room Number Eight. I backtracked through the labyrinth of corridors to the outside, where I stared at three unmarked doors wondering which held the ATM-like machine that accepted payments.
Luckily, the sweatered man who preceded me in Room Number Six had done the necessary reconnaissance by exhausting two of the three options. I trailed him through the third door and used the machine when he was done.
With receipt in hand I returned to the first building and found my place in a new line – for Room Number Eight. The sweatered man was already there and we exchanged a curt nod to re-forge our bond in the waiting chain. Before long, a young woman called me into the room, where she instructed me to remove my shirt and tell her my name.
“Dzhon-a-tan,” I said with the thickest Russian accent I could muster for the word “Jonathan.” Next she asked for my patronymic—the Russian equivalent of a middle name, which is your father’s name followed by “-ovich” if you’re male, or “-ovna” if you’re female. I replied with a word pretty much impossible to make sound Russian: “Dale-ovich.”
She swiveled in her chair and regarded me curiously. “Tigers?” she guessed, linking the two things she knew about me: that I was (a) a foreigner needing a shot; and (b) someone who spends a lot of time in the forest. Those two things often equal “tiger researcher” in the region.
After my shot the nurse instructed me to wait in the hallway for twenty-five minutes, just in case I had an adverse reaction to the vaccine. I complied and found a spot on a bench, where I watched the clock as a current of people flowed in and out of Room Number Eight.
I noticed that no one else waited after leaving Number Eight as I was doing; I assumed they all received a different kind of shot that did not carry the same dangers as mine. After about twenty minutes there was a lull in traffic, and the nurse emerged from Room Number Eight. When she saw me she stopped short.
“You’re still here…you’re waiting like I asked you to!” She was genuinely taken aback. “No one ever waits!”
Four weeks later I returned to the clinic for my follow up shot, and when I entered Room Number Eight, I recognized the same woman who had given me my shot the month before. She, apparently, recalled me as well.
“I remember you,” she said warmly, “you’re The One Who Waited!”
Jonathan C. Slaght 