Bruce
Marcot Field Journal,
Log Entries, 11-12 June 1994
10:40
pm ... at kerosene-lantern dinner table at Shivki Field Station cabin ... tight
table, family style dinner with much good humor, toasts in
Russian with vodka, then in Chinese with baijou, their traditional liquor
... later, bedrolls on the floor, rustic.
No electricity or water.
Evening
sunset was utterly spectacular, orange flames across the entire sky, muted
by mist and fog. Distant
crepuscular call of a marsh bird, a band-bellied crake, from some unseen
bog. The field station here is
on 10 km of nearly-impassable clay "roads." In these rains, the
roads are literally streams, and we sloshed and pounded upriver in the lorry
like some impossible Jurassic salmon. Dense
hardwood jungle surrounds the house for kilometers.
Mosquitoes attack you in shark swarms and ticks cling to each leg --
must be very careful about the mosquito-borne Japanese encephalitis, and the
tick-borne version of the same disease, and dose up on Deet.
Present
in the Shivki Field Station forest are roe deer, red deer, and wild boar.
Further south in western Primorsky Krai are found spotted deer (Cervus
nippon), escapees from breeding farms, that essentially have outcompeted
and excluded red deer from the area, rendering the area much less suitable
for tiger. Red deer, along with
wild boar, are the main native prey species of the tiger.
Out
in the forests at night in Shivki: dense clouds of biting mosquitoes; the whistled trill call of
the crake; and a cacophony of Japanese tree frogs, Hyla
(arborea) japonica.
Next
day, and a seven-hour hike through the tick-infested Shivki jungles, and we spot
old-world badger burrows, scat, and runways; red deer tracks; wild boar
forage areas; brown bear claw marks on a tree trunk 7-8' high; and a good
single print that I identify as Siberian tiger, only several hours old and
on the same game trail we follow. Our
host and guide, Alexander "Sasha" Antonov, had seen a tiger here 2
years ago, and tiger tracks over the winter time, but this was the first
summer time track.
We
catch a white-striped rat snake (Elaphe
dione), a common frog (Rana chensinensis), a fire-bellied toad (Bombina
orientalis), and a common toad (Bufo gargarizans).
The common toad usually breeds in late May, but we found a pair in
amplexus (mating grasp), a late breeder.
Its Russian common name translates to "Far Eastern gray
toad," and only 5 years ago or so was taxonomically split from Bufo
bufo. The fire-bellied toad was spectactular, its belly appearing like
some orange-red flames.
