One year later in Russia again (Kluchiki, Thursday, June 25, 2004)

We arrived to Kluchiki yesterday afternoon. It's our third visit to the village that belongs to the richer in Suzun district. Bricked houses, cars - it's nothing exceptional here. Little fields and cows in cowsheds behind the houses are quite common here on the other hand. They could live very hardly without their own sources of food. Most people in Kluchiki belong to those Siberian who try to live the best possible way and not to linger and dispel the spleen by some wildcat whiskey as many people for instance from near Taradanov do.

Nikolaj Juskov, who helped us even in past years, accommodated us in his house (we are only two this time - me and Frantisek Pojer) and Miss Jusikova began to serve the dishes for dinner. Borsch, vegetable salad, plov (similar to risotto), fried fish, fresh milk and cream, "tchaynij chleb" (similar to minced meat roll). Great majority of the food comes from home production and it say all about its quality. The cream can be sliced with a knife and "cajnyj chleb" is baked exclusively from meat. (May the Juskovs try to taste the food from our hypermarkets...)

Our main goal here near Ob is to catch Iristu and his nonfunctional satellite receiver and replace it with the terrestrial one. This should enable further Iristu tracking at the wintering grounds in India. But the nest that Iristu bore the chicks at we found empty this morning... The optimistic option went wrong.

We drove Nikolai's gaz (old military jeep) from the abandoned nest to she bank of Ob near Malyshevo. The houses that were far enough from the water were not here anymore. Ob bit part of the village again... Franta turned on the receiver. "Can you hear it?" The weak peeps showed that Iristu is quite far from us but is here!

While Nikolai and Franta began to round other nests, I was monitoring Iristu from the river. Nothing was happening, when suddenly a stork flew out from Zaobi about 10 o'clock, who made it along the Iristu's direction. After a while, Iristu's signal got stronger - and no more than a hundred meters away from me there were two black storks flying. Iristu and (probably) his partner. The last time I saw Iristu was 6 months ago and 3600 kilometers southward - in Gujarat. Nice encounter!

We believe Iristu is going to lead us to his new nest. The problem is that he is always staying there only for a short while to feed the chicks. He is spending most of the time in Zaobi. We will probably spend much time monitoring and searching in this rainy and cold weather...

Forests here, they are the chapter itself. They resemble our ones at first sight but the feeling is quite different. It's a strange silence here, clouds of mosquitoes, but the main difference is that we can hardly orientate ourselves here. While I awaited Iristu fly to the nest again tonight, I said to myself that I had to write something like "even if you have a great sense of orientation, you can go astray hopelessly in this forest quite easily"; I was sure that the Siberians wouldn't lose their way so easily. But two hours later, exactly the same time, Nikolai was hopelessly rambling in the forest...