Russell's Blog

The weather is absolutely beautiful today; sunny with a few puffy, fast-moving clouds, about 60F with gusts of cool wind.

After breakfast, Frank, Alex, Anna and I hiked to Orange Field. Most of the hike was over open country without trails; we had the GPS coordinates, but no route. We passed through a few stands of birch and pine. The prospect of encountering a bear in enclosed areas makes entering these clumps of trees an unattractive course of action, one could say. Encountering the occasional bear seems to be unavoidable in Uzon, so we stuck to open country and burned up some calories circling around the trees. The August sun could have made this torture back in Davis, but at almost 55 degrees north with patches of snow lurking in the shady spots of the caldera, it wasn't so bad.

A meadow abutting the caldera wall on the hike to Orange Field springs.

It's astonishing how much plant diversity there is here. What looks like fields from a distance are really dense mixtures of dozens (hundreds?) of species of plant, crowded together in a tangled riot. When I put my face near the ground, it looks a tropical rain forest, only ten inches high.

We are here to study microbes, but it's very difficult not to wonder about this hardy community of plants. How do they survive the winter? Why does one kind of plant cluster in one place and not another? For what do they compete, and how do they do it? Do any of them cooperate? How do the seeds disperse? What pollinates the flowers?

I am puzzled I that there seem to be so few pollinators in Uzon. I found a few insects that looked like bees, but I'm not familiar enough with entomology to rule out the possibility that they could be bee-like flies, or possibly wasps. In any event, there were not very many of them. The only insect I found visiting a flower today is a thing that looked like an earwig, but it was probably there because it took a wrong turn somewhere. The millions of flowers in Uzon seem to go mostly unvisited.

Panorama from the ridge overlooking Orange Field springs.

Anya was here in Uzon in 2005, except a few weeks later in the year. In her pictures from that expedition, the whole caldera looks like it's been set afire as the hardwood brush gets ready to drop its leaves.

The other thing that puzzles me was how few birds there are. The caldera is bursting with blueberries and mosquitoes, and yet I've seen only one swallow and heard not a single songbird. Meadows in California with a tenth the productivity (i.e., insects, fruit and seeds) are usually crammed with swallows, starlings (introduced, of course), jays, finches and songbirds. In Uzon, there are only a few white, long-winged birds with V-shaped tails that fly low and fast above the streams. They look a bit like a quarter-scale seagull, but re-engineered for speed and extreme distance-flying. They have bodies built like marathon runners, so I suppose Uzon must be a quick stop on a long journey for them. I've only seen two or three of these on a given day so far.

The lack of birds, especially songbirds, and the lack of pollinators are probably related. The winter in Kamchatka is too harsh for most birds to overwinter, so most birds found here would be migratory. Insects are ideal diet for a long-distance migratory birds, and they need lots of them to build up enough fat reserves for their world-crossing journeys. Maybe our timing is off, and we've just missed the migratory birds, or maybe they will arrive later when the blueberries are riper, or when their favorite species of insect reaches its crescendo. Or, perhaps the birds that used to come here are gone, their migratory route destroyed by a parking lot in a faraway place.

A carnivorous plant waits for the arrival of small, unlucky insects on the bank of Orange Field springs.

Karnosky National Biosphere Preserve is for Russia what Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon are to America. It is perhaps the single most beloved natural site in this vast country, and the people who have studied and explored it are heroes in Russia (they should be heroes worldwide). Tatiana Ustinova, who discovered the Valley of the Geysers, could be the John Muir of Russia. I'm sure that someone has studied the songbirds in Uzon, or lack thereof, just as the songbirds of Yosemite have been meticulously studied. However, Ustinova only discovered the Valley of the Geysers in 1941, whereas Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy were well known to the world more than a hundred years prior.

The problem, I think, is the disconnect of the scientific literature among countries. Before I left for Kamchatka, I looked for books like John Muir Laws' beautifully illustrated field guide to the plants, fungi and animals of the Sierras, but I could not find anything. My questions have probably been asked and answered, but only in Russian, and probably only in journals far from the beaten path.

I hope that this will change.

Debris left over from Karpov's old house (I think), which was heated by geothermal power. I'm holding the auger used to drill the well.

At Orange Field, Alex and Anna collected several samples for their colleagues at the Russian Academy of Science. We spent about two hours roaming around and waiving Anna's GPS at the sky, trying to pinpoint which spring was which. This is an uncertain proposition in a place like Uzon, which is subject to the vicissitudes snow, snowmelt erosion, the dynamic processes of volcanism, and curious bears that like to dig holes.

Team Russia, for the win!

When we got back, we ran the generator for a while so Sarah could do her DNA extractions. I used the opportunity to work on metagenomic analysis for Arkashin and Zavarzin a bit, organize photos, assemble some panoramas, and edit the last couple of days of blog entries. I also got in some really excellent procrastination on finishing my talk. I squished one hundred and sixteen mosquitoes and three biting black flies.

Anna made Borscht for us again, and it was, if anything, even more delicious than her previous Borscht. Same ingredients, same pot, same stove, same sour cream. I am puzzled, but that seems to be my lot in life.