November 2021 update

Dear Friends

Hopefully long waited report:)

Now Park is already facing a winter. This year it came quiet early, and now ice on the rivers is already thick enough to drive on a car

Last time I wrote the report for Patreon was when the bison were loaded on a ship to go through Arctic ocean. I think I mentioned that they got stuck for quiet a while in Archangelsk and the ship left on August 15th instead of July 30th. Which was not very good since there is no option to release the bison in Archangelsk and they had to stay in the container the whole time. Yaroslav was taking care of them, but being stuck in container for so long is not pleasant anyway. 

Once the ship left there was no connection with Yaroslav and I had no idea how the expedition is going. However I had the smartphone app which showed the location of the ship every hour, precise weather forecast with 2d map of winds along the way and updated satellite imagery of the floating ice in the Arctic Ocean. Ship which was carrying the bison is rather small and the pace wasn’t too fast. Plus in the first days I was really worried about the bison since along the route there was constant and rather strong winds around 10 m/s which is in my experience is making waves quiet big already. And I had no idea how the bison will deal with the sea sickness. Not that many people were transporting bison on the ocean ships in the past (if any).

In about a week later when ship passed Enisey mouth Yaroslav sent a short text message that everything is good.  Then connection with Yaroslav was lost for another 10 or 12 days. Finally we managed to talk when the ship was making a stop at the sea port of Pevek 400km from our home town. Yaroslav told that bison are doing well, and that they had very bad appetite in the first 5 days of the travel, but then it returned back to normal.

Finally on September 9th ship with the bison arrived. In the local sea port ship with our bison was parked at the peer right away (these days there is a huge queue in any seaport and ships have to wait for weeks to be loaded/unloaded), cutting through the long line of other ships. Local head of the seaport apparently has a much higher passion to animals than head of Archangelsk sea port. We parked small barge to the ship and port crane moved the container from one vessel to another. From there it took bison only 5 hours to get to the Park.

Unloading of bison went very tricky. I keep forgetting that those animals are not as tame as camels for example, and it is a really wild animal, which is barely domesticated. We built a wide wooden bridge for animals to walk out from the barge and had temporally fenced the area at the basecamp so animals would have a corridor to walk into the quarantine area. As usually bison did not want to get out of the cages. Then once they walked out it appeared too slippery on a metal barge for them and all bison from the first room slipped once they got out of the container (after releasing bison from the first section of the container we added wood and hay on the floor). Then they did not want to walk to the shore, then some of them fell from the bridge, some hit the infrastructure at the basecamp and one broke the temporal fence, crossed the river and escaped to the big fence area. Here is the link to the movie made by Russian federal news channel where they put into the movie process of bison unloading (not that I was happy about itJ ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN9iPnJluyw&t=8s

Finally after several hours 11 bison were in the quarantine and last one was hiding somewhere in the shrublands in the northern part of the Park. About 2 or 3 weeks later this bison returned back to the shore, and only couple of weeks ago my workers managed to get it back to the herd. As I said those animals really don’t like to be sheparded.

I was really worried about the bison in general, since original plan was to bring them in the early August, so they would have time to adapt and recover from the trip before the winter. In reality they came a month later and as I said winter this year is much earlier. So we put animals on intensive feed, and gave them access to the best pastures we have (had to kick camels out of the area for the quarantine period). Fortunately bison are once again proving to be very sturdy animals and they managed to get fat and have good fur growing. Only difference from the first herd is that these animals do spend nights in the shelter we built them (first herd never walked in there). But I am fine with it. Need to make sure they will survive the first winter.

All other animals are doing good. They are separated in different fenced areas. New for this year camels and goats are doing really well. They are now in the same area as the new bison.

I will arrive to the Park tomorrow so will post fresh images from there on our Instagram and facebook pages. Please subscribe if you haven’t done so yet.

Other updates

· With lots of troubles (apparently this year everything went with lots of troubles) but we mostly brought all the animal forage required for the winter. Barge with hay was stuck in Seimchan (upper stream of the Kolyma) for more than the month and arrived only in mid September. Water level was too low and we had to move hay from big barge to a small barge and then unload in the Park. But overall we brought 85 rolls, which should be enough. Half of the concentrated forage arrived in time and is already in the Park and second part was finally loading in Archangelsk when Kolyma river already froze already and just recently arrived to Pevek (sea port I mentioned earlier). So will have to take two big trucks which I bought for camels and goats, and transport all the forage after the new year when winter roads will open. But storage we have in the Park at the moment is plenty for now.

· All the net for the fence arrived to the Park and is now stacked there. We are still not nearly done with installing new posts, and hopefully will be able to finish next year, but slowly we are getting there. In 2005 when we were building the fence our pace of work was 3 times faster when I was working myself. Now when I have to employ people for that, it is just going way too slow.

· We have the tall tower in the Park running with new CO2 and CH4 equipment. Doing science in collaboration with University of Alaska. Had this tower running in 2008-2015 and last year grant was renewed. Also next spring will install two small towers with similar equipment which will be focused on animal impact on the ecosystems. Grant with Oxford team got approved and in the next 3 years will work on testing the Pleistocene Park hypothesis

And the plans for the future

· First of all. Next year we are going to bring musk ox. This time plan is more settled and approved. This summer we got contacted by Alrosa, and Russian diamond company which is working mostly in our local state of Yakutia. They expressed interest to support us, and next year will cover an expedition to catch musk ox in the northwest of Yakutia. The plan is to catch 25 young animals. We originally wanted to do it this year, but started preparation to late and had to postpone. We already have agreement with Yakutian ministry of ecology, who will perform the catchments of animals, we have permission from federal agencies to catch and transport the wildlife, and we have approved funding from Alrosa for that (and it is a very expensive activity which would require renting a Mi-8 helicopter for several days and then a charter airplane to take animals to our home town). So really-really excited about it.

· Also we are still considering to transport European bison from France. But I will deal with that only if there will be found extra funding to support the transportation. Too complicated to invest own resources. Plus honestly saying all those new animals and activities in the Park this year got me into a huge depts. And I think I will be able to pay it back only next year the earliest.

· With all animals this year, and 25 musk ox next year, I think we will be pretty much filling the currently fenced territory. Hopefully next year we will have fence renovated and then animals will do the job on promotion of grazing ecosystems. And we in turn must start thinking on getting our entire territory fenced. And that is actually not as complicated as I originally thought. This year I purchased (with our own funds and donations) 20km of fence, prepared enough logs, and installed half of them. This embrace 20km2. And if I would want to emprace entire 144km2 of territory I would need only 50km of fence. Which is only 2.5 times what we are doing right now. So my thoughts are now on where to get enough logs, how to buy a powerfull drill which would be able to drill the permafrost (our current method with the steam is cheap but way too slow), and where to make a rangers basecamps. Realistically I think we will be able to do this task in 2 or 3 years even with the current rates of research station profits and donations we gather. And this is going to be the new priority for the Park development in the near future. Current population of 150-200 animals is sufficient for the current territory. Animals will have time to adapt, we will see which populations are growing the best, and on which animals to focus in the future. Once the new big fence will be done we will work on getting more animals. Once we will have 2000+ animals we will be able to introduce some predators. And then the ecosystem will be more or less complete. Of course there is many other activities we are going to do. Mostly in increasing our understanding of how ecosystems functions, what key elements are required for sustainable grazing ecosystem, what climatic effect those ecosystems have etc.

So that is about all I have to say.

Wish you all health and a good winter. Thank you for your support!

Best regards

Nikita Zimov