Scientist Gleb Raygorodetsky ©Cheryl Chetkiewicz.

What led you to return to Kamchatka after ten years away?
I’d been wanting to do something for the place where I grew up. In the mid-nineties, I wrote a letter to George Schaller, WCS director for science, who very kindly responded. He’d recently read an article that had interested him about the poaching of Kamchatka’s bears. He arranged for me to join a WCS project that had already begun there, and help with logistics on the ground.

Is it difficult for scientists to do research there?
There are no good roadmaps in Kamchatka. Instead you need to travel by helicopter. It costs $3,000–4,000 a trip to get anywhere, so it’s quite expensive, and requires a lot of funding. Researchers also have to be prepared to spend several months in the field there and carry most of their supplies and provisions with them.

Is that because the peninsula is so remote?
Partially. Also, the bureaucracy is a stew pot of its own—it’s hard to get visas and permits to travel there. And on a local level, there is a lot of political instability. Even though there are so many local experts, it’s hard to get anything done. It’s a difficult situation to resolve. There’s a lot of antagonism towards foreign scientists coming in and working or conducting research, particularly in the zapovedniks [strictly protected areas].

Did you decide to stay on in Kamchatka?
Since 1998, I’ve been going every year, several months at a time. In the spring of 2000, I started my doctoral project there, run through the WCS Asia Program. I was comparing different regimes of wildlife use and protection, looking at whether strictly protected areas like Kronotskyi Zapovednik versus harvested areas provided wildlife the same kind of protection during the period of socio-economic and political crisis in Russia. We collected long-term population data to study this question.

What did you find?
The results of my research show that a major change like the collapse of the USSR significantly affects not only human institutions, but populations of economically valuable wildlife as well. During the period of relative socio-economic and political stability (Soviet times), both managed harvest and strict protection maintained relatively stable levels of wildlife populations. This included furbearing species, such as Russian sable, red fox, and ermine. After the collapse, economically important species like sable became depleted in harvested areas, while their populations remained relatively stable in strictly protected areas.

How have these socioeconomic and political changes impacted the lives of native Kamchatkans?
There are several indigenous groups living in Kamchatka. For the area’s traditional reindeer herders—the Even people, who live as nomads in Bystrinsky Nature Park in the central part of the peninsula—changes in the region have had serious effects. During the Soviet times, the herders stopped being the owners of their destiny but just state employees. That really damaged the dynamic of their relationship with the land and animals. Now, with the economy’s transition toward some form of private ownership and market relationships, their connection with the landscape is slowly being restored, but it remains quite tenuous.

Sockeye salmon in Kurilskoie Lake, Kamchatka. ©Gleb Raygorodetsky

What have these changes meant for the bears?
Bears now have to compete for the same resources with people—pine nuts and berries, but particularly salmon, which poachers fish to harvest salmon roe (eggs), or caviar. Often the caviar is airlifted out of Kamchatka to be sold on the Russian market. The fact that the salmon population is now being depleted is a big threat because in addition to the bears going hungry, poachers see them as rivals. This leads to dangerous consequences for the bears.

Bears are part of human culture the world over—as part of local folktales, as the national symbol of Russia, and as a pair of constellations in the Milky Way. Do you think this universal charisma improves their chances for survival into the future?
For now, the numbers of bears in Kamchatka remain relatively healthy—estimates vary from 12,500 to 15,000 animals. There is, however, little biological and human use-related information to develop a sound management plan, to ensure that the population remains healthy and to provide local people with much needed income. This is something that WCS has been trying to address over the last few years, but it has been difficult to do for a number of reasons. It’s challenging to raise funds to cover the costs associated with doing this kind of work in such a remote place. On the flip side, it is often easier to get funding to work with big, furry animals that capture human imagination, even if this cuddly-looking creature can potentially harm a person. But a strange fact of the human psyche is that until you are about to lose something, those sentiments don’t really kick in.