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Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)


	"Sometimes it gets lonely, just the three of us": Pavel, a Russian hunter, in his apartment outside Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

IN THE DECADE SINCE THE SOVIET collapse, no region of Russia has fallen further or faster than Kamchatka. There are projects to mine gold and nickel, and a natural-gas pipeline has been haltingly under construction, but it has failed to lure the multi-billion-dollar petroleum deals of its neighbor, Sakhalin, across the Sea of Okhotsk. An economic up swing is still nowhere in sight. A big question, as always, is whether development and wildlife can coexist.

"Kamchatka is a test case," said Guido Rahr, 43, president of the Portland, Oregon–based Wild Salmon Center, a conservation outfit funded by such top U.S. philanthropists as Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. "It's one of the last great chances we have anywhere to save incredible natural bounty in the face of inevitable economic development."

"But it's still a little wild over there," Rahr added. He didn't mean the bears.

Poaching is a huge problem—illegal salmon caviar, for example, is helicoptered out by the ton. But the big money on Kamchatka comes from the spring trophy hunt, a legal, state-sanctioned harvest in which Westerners pay as much as $12,000 for a chance to shoot a giant grizzly. The spring hunt would raise an outcry in North America:

In the spring, dark bears make slow and easy targets against the white snow for Western hunters. Though no one shoots the bears from helicopters anymore, guides are still used to flush animals toward waiting clients, who have snowmobiled in.

Dark bears make slow and easy targets against the white snow, and though no one hunts from helicopters anymore, guides are still used to flush animals toward clients, who have snowmobiled in.

"In Alaska, you can only get a bear tag once every four years," said Denny Geurink, a Michigan outfitter who has brought more than a thousand Americans to Kamchatka since 1991. "In Kamchatka, I can get you two a year."

Kamchatka's bears, moreover, are generally larger than American grizzlies—females can top 700 pounds, males as much as 1,400. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors in Anchorage, who greet the weekly flights from P.K., recorded 148 bears coming back through Alaska in spring 2003. Of the 108 hunters who traveled through Anchorage, only six had not gotten a bear—a 94.5 percent success rate. "For bears," said Bruce Woods, Fish and Wildlife's Anchorage spokesman, "that's pretty astounding."

This rate of culling cannot be sustained, especially when by all estimates there are even more bears poached each year. No one knows the exact size of Kamchatka's bear population, but local wildlife biologists estimate that 10,000 live across the entire peninsula. Kamchatka's Hunting Regulation Department sets the annual kill quota at 500 to 550, but that's just the legal take. Multiply that two or three times, said Igor Revenko, a ranger and biologist who worked with Russell and Enns in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary, and you'll get the number of illegally poached bears. Russians pay less for a bear tag, but the price hike from $21 to $214 in 2004 is too rich for most Kamchatkans. Even formerly law-abiding Russians take bears without a permit, and there's little enforcement.

"Every man in Kamchatka can hunt for bear illegally," Yuri Garashchenko, head of the regional natural resources department, told me. "And most do."

At the current rate, scientists like the late Vitaly Nikolaenko, the researcher killed in 2003, fear the population cannot survive. For years, Nikolaenko was the lonely champion of a ban of the spring hunt, a practice that he and others believed devastates the gene pool, as hunters pick off the population's biggest males, the brazen ones that emerge from hibernation first.

There have, however, been recent signs of hope. The great mass of Russians, all too aware of the Soviet ecocide that decimated their land, have a passionate sense of the need to protect their environment. And though funding remains almost nil for state-run environmental operations, international groups have taken up some slack: The United Nations Development Program is providing $13 million for Kamchatkan ecotourism and biodiversity projects and $14 million for salmon conservation; and the Wildlife Conservation Society, the scientific arm of the Bronx Zoo, is conducting the first thorough study of the region's bear population.

More encouraging was the shocking move that came last July, when Kamchatka's governor, Mikhail Mashkovtsev—after a much-publicized state visit from President Vladimir Putin—suddenly reversed course and banned the spring hunt, beginning in 2005. All 500 or so tags would now be issued for the fall hunt, when far fewer Westerners brave the conditions and bears are harder to find.

In Moscow, I'd heard how Kamchatka had become a political problem for Putin. "The president is aware of the mess," said Yulia Latynina, a commentator for The Moscow Times, "and he is determined to clean house." Some said it was a hollow political move, a shill by Putin to gain badly needed good press in the West. But rarely does Putin brook untidy disarray in any Russian region. If Kamchatka had made it onto the Kremlin radar, you could be sure there would be a serious push for change.

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