"Sibir" by Farley Mowat, Reflections On An Older Book About Siberia

 

For many years, I have read the works of Canadian naturalist and author Farley Mowat, and several months ago my wife and I read several of his books together which had been the first time she had ever been exposed to his wonderful writiing.  The only negative comment I can make about Mowat and his work is that after he had become widely and wildly successful for works like "Never Cry Wolf" and "A Whale For The Killing", some of his later works were less interesting, less exciting, and, of course, less popular.  But every book I have ever read by Mowat was still filled with occasional shots of his splendid writing and voluminous vocabulary.  When I was younger, I would often read his books with a dictionary by my side because I knew I would find some words along the way that I had never heard, some from his life as a world traveling Canadian, and some from his having been descended from Scottish ancestors who must have passed a great deal of their linguistic panache along with their DNA.  

This book we are discussing was published in 1970, and came about because Mowat was invited to come to Russia by a Russian writer who also lived in and wrote about the extreme north of the country, Siberia, one of the coldest climates on earth with the possible exception of the peaks of the Alps and Himalayas.  Naturally, Mowat took the man up on his offer and eventually made several trips to Russia and Siberia.  In spite of the cold war, and because international concerns were different in those days, Mowat said that he was always well received and well treated wherever he went in the Russia, and particularly in Siberia.  I have been motivated to remember and write about this particular book, because my wife and I are currently reading a much less scholarly book about that region, "Last Of The Breed" by Louis L'Amour which I picked up on a whim in a Goodwill store because it was uncharacteristic of L'Amour's western writing.  I had also picked up two other L'Amour books for the same reason, already read and written about one of them, "Yondering" which is a collection of his short stories.  "Last Of The Breed" has led me back to this Mowat book because, to his credit, L'Amour had done some reasonable amount of research about Siberia before he wrote his book about an American pilot who escapes from a Siberian prison and is attempting to cross Siberia to Alaska in order to escape.  

Issues such as those in the L'Amour book never arose in Mowat's experience in Siberia although the two men do write about several similar aspects of the region which was far less developed in the times Mowat traveled there than it was in 1986 when L'Amour wrote his novel. The vast majority of the region was what is known as the taiga, a vast forested area which was replete with wildlife and few people.  Mowat was being guided on his visits by Yuri Rythkheu, a Russian nature writer and naturalist whose works were motivated by many of the same concerns which motivated Mowat.  The two became close friends over the years they knew each other and corresponded regularly, and in those times, Russia was considerably less repressive than it is today.  Mowat was allowed to travel extensively in the country, was often given official welcomes by local government officials and greeted much like a celebrity might have been even in America at the time.  He came to love Siberia, the Taiga, the people, and the vast wildlife of the region, and writes about it with a great deal of the same emotion and general protective concern he wrote about his native Canadian north.  The people he eoncountered in his travels there were much more open than Russians are today and, at times, Mowat found himself invited into homes and even involved in fairly wild parties.  

I have also known a few others of my friends and acquaintances who have been privileged to travel to Russia in the past including a nurse practitioner who went there as a  young nurse with a Christian based medical entourage and claims to have bribed an airport security officer in order to be allowed to take some medications into the country which she said the officer claimed were not permitted.  Nearly forty years ago, I also knew a few people who traveled to Russia as part of a group sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group.  But none of those people were ever received in Russia in the open hearted way that Mowat was.  This is a fascinating book despite its age and good reading for anyone who likes to learn the history of other places in the world.  If you can find a copy, read it.  You won't be disappointed.  And, you might even like "Last Of The Breed" by Louis L'Amour. 

An Unusual Sight In Nature In My Backyard!

 

Yesterday, August 27, 2023, I had one of the instances of being in the right place at the right time to see a very unusual, at least for me, sight while I was in my backyard.  For several years, we have fed birds at our house and have a fairly large flock of ruby-throated hummingbirds ever year.  This  year we have two feeders out for them and regularly need to fill one of them every two days and the other about every three days.  I have known for a while, maybe two weeks, that the young humming birds had fledged based on the sudden increase in numbers on the feeders.  

We have several Rose of Sharon trees around our house which the humming birds love when they are in bloom.  I was standing in the yard yesterday and saw a humming bird feeding on the large Rose of Sharon behind our house.  I knew the bird was either  female or a juvenile but it totally surprised me when it left the flower it was feeding on and flew to within about 3 feet of me and literally fell out of the air into the grass near me.  I knew instantly that it had to be an immature, freshly fledged hatchling, probably on its first day of flight and I was wondering if it would get airborne again.  But, after just a few seconds of lying in the grass, it was in the air again and back on the Rose of Sharon.  I had never seen this happen before although I see unusual events with wildlife at my house fairly frequently.  In February 2021, I opened my back door on an unusually cold night to see a mourning dove just sitting in the dark on my driveway.  That bird managed to fly when I walked close to it and started to bend over and pick it up in what would have been an attempt to get it to survive.  Once recently in what was a driving and freezing rain which turned into an ice storm, I saw, through my family room window,  a mink chase a rabbit around the corner of my house and into my front yard just out of my line of sight where the mink killed the rabbit brought it back across the driveway  headed back to its den.  I have had both red foxes, coyotes, and coons on my property in broad daylight and I have photographs of both deer and wild turkeys on my driveway eating bird seed.  But I had never seen a humming bird literally fall out of the sky at my feet.  This was a highly unusual sighting and well worth seeing. 

Watching June Bugs Hatch And Leave The Ground

 

Someone I know in Knott County just posted on Facebook about having a large number of June Bugs in his yard after not seeing any/many for quite a while and reminded me of this little event I saw almost thirty years ago.  It involved a new hatch of June bugs leaving the ground. I was at the home of a local preacher, Gene Eason, who has long since left this area and retired. I was walking around in the yard and noticed a June bug walking up a leaf of grass. It sat there a minute, spread its wings out and shook them a couple of time and I realized they were wet. Then it flew off. A few seconds later another came up the leaf of grass and I realized there was a small hole in the ground below the grass they were climbing. I stood there and watched as several more came out of the ground, dried their wings, and flew away. It was the first time I realized that June bugs lay their eggs in the ground in late summer or fall and they hatch in spring or early summer, leave the ground, and fly away. What I told my friend in Knott County was that he has probably had a big  hatch in his yard.

In Eastern Kentucky, nearly all of us grew up catching June Bugs and tying a sewing string to one of their legs and flying them around when we were children.  It's not really a 21st Century kind of approved way to deal with nature but it was fun as a child. 

Common Snapping Turtles And Their Quirks

Newly Hatched Common Snapping Turtle--Photo By Roger D. Hicks

Yesterday, June 9, 2018, while mowing grass in an area of my yard that I sometimes let get a bit rough, and wild, I uncovered a newly hatched, but dead, Common Snapping Turtle.  In more than twenty-five years of living in this house, this is the second occasion on which I have found baby snapping turtles in roughly that same section of the yard.  The first occasion was more than twenty years ago when I found several live, newly hatched Common Snapping Turtles in that area.  As you can see by the photograph above, a newly hatched Common Snapping Turtle is only slightly larger in diameter than a quarter and my wedding band.  At this stage and size, immediately upon hatching they are totally independent and self sufficient. For the first few weeks of their lives they will subsist on insects, worms, and possibly even some vegetation.  But don't let their need to hatch and survive on their own lead you to jump to the conclusion that a female Common Snapping Turtle, or any other female turtle, has no maternal instincts.  

My entire yard looks down on the roof of an abandoned house owned by a neighboring farmer and that house has never been flooded.  My yard sits about thirty or forty vertical feet above the level of Big Spring Branch and White Oak Creek at their confluence.  The edge of my yard is a rocky bluff which overlooks the state highway on which I live.  My driveway drops straight off the edge of the bluff to the highway and I have actually fallen on it once near the top while shoveling snow in winter and slid on my back all the way down its ice covered surface to the highway.  To say the least it is steep and I do not necessarily believe that a female turtle would be likely to travel straight up the paved driveway to the yard which is the only relatively easy way for an animal to make the trip.  Admittedly, there is a bit of a game trail up and over the bluff, through the brush and timber which I let grow there for privacy.  But for a reptile with short little legs and a hard shell that is not a walk in the park or a swift swim on White Oak Creek.  It is a long trudge of at least two hundred feet up a creek bank, across a paved state highway, and up a brushy, rocky bank to lay twenty to forty eggs which she will cover with dirt, grass, and leaves, and never see again.  The effort involved in traveling to my yard, laying and covering eggs, and making the return trip to the creek belies the belief that turtles have no maternal instincts.  The female turtles who have laid eggs in my yard have gone a long way to find a safe, dry place for their nests well above the water line.  We are talking about a reptile which lives primarily in the waters of small creeks and near their shores and I live in a house where I have never bought flood insurance.  In fact, my banks, when I was paying a mortgage, did not require me to have flood insurance.  

Adult Common Snapping Turtle Photo by naturealmanac.com

I mentioned in a post on Facebook earlier this spring that I had saved a presumably female Red Eared Slider turtle on US Highway 460 in Magoffin County Kentucky a few miles from my home.  At the time, I assumed she too was heading somewhere to lay her eggs.  Over the years, I have found many Common Snapping Turtles on highways all across the Eastern United States.  In the majority of those cases, they are females hunting a place to lay eggs.  However, there are times when they will make such moves to find a better food source or to escape a drying water source.  But, the bottom line is this: do not be surprised if you find a female, water dwelling turtle in a spot that is high and dry.