Up the stork nest
On Saturday, a wonderfully crazy director Rostislav Silo introduced me with a wonderfully crazy young man who is keen on the local reserves. We all met yesterday and both of them reassured me we'd find the nest for sure.
Rostislav took us out together with his beautiful wife Olga, son Andrey and crazy Vyaceslav. He sat us into his new Uaz - a new type of a formerly popular Gaz car - and then we went about 200 km southeast. Slavek counted storks' nests 7 years ago. We got to the local huntsman and Slavek wanted to make him give out his contacts on former colleagues. He started to argue with him and told me ulteriorly that he belonged to poachers and had almost stopped the whole cooperation before it started. Then it became clear that after counting the nests up one interested boy probably got in touch with foreigners who two years after that toured the nests in surroundings, showing various nature-reserving organizations' recommendations. A few days on all eggs disappeared from the nests. Not only storks' ones but eagles' ones as well. The huntsmen do not like to show anything to anybody. Sure, there are poachers amongst them, but they have bigger respect for storks than in the Czech Republic. Such news desolated Slavek. They did the counting for the birds' protection and, in fact, showed the robbers the right path.
At last, Rostislav persuaded a local chief of hunters by means of his zoo-director image. He called for a gamekeeper who drove us to the nest that was occupied last year. At the spot we found that they'd cut the tree down in winter and the birds had moved away. We bumped back along the way to the office and met other man who took us to a 30 km distant village Klyucky to a local gamekeeper. After sad experience, Nikolaj told us that he would show us abandoned but not active nest that he had seen hatches at a few days ago. Coma tried to get me. I am so close and nothing out of it.
Rostislav persuaded again and we got milk from a cow to drink and after a while we were bumping tens of kilometers through Taiga. Nikolaj is in charge of 400 square kilometers. He showed us an empty nest. It rose me and I stopped perceiving those unbearable mosquitoes. In a few seconds we stood under a charming strong pine amidst a birch forest with huge mushrooms. There was a nest on the tree; a female had flown away. And after I clambered up through the mosquitoes' attacks on the neighboring tree, I could see two small heads, still white.
At last we have an occupied stork nest!