Almost a week ago now, I was sitting on a train going south. This was not one of those nice trains to St. Petersburg, but a suburban train, known as the электричка (elektrichka), and I was going to a place called Виноградовская Пойма, or Vinogradovskaya Floodplain. On this train ride, I was reading a wonderful novel we read for Diane’s class, The Kukotsky Enigma by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. I’ll try to avoid talking too much about the details of it for those who haven’t read it, but a major theme of the book relates to memory, and on this train as I read this bit about a saxophone, I couldn’t shake off the impression that a saxophone had been important earlier, but I just couldn’t recall when. The environment wasn’t ideal for concentration: the train was loud, the seat was uncomfortable, and occasionally people would come either selling something, singing, or just simply begging. But eventually I recalled, and then I had an epiphany about the novel.

I arrived after two hours on the stuffy, very brown train. I saw a sign that said, roughly “It is prohibited to jump off the platform”, which I incorrectly interpreted to mean that I shouldn’t cross the rails, and subsequently set off in the wrong direction. However, when I ended up in a town I realized my mistake and turned around. I found a singing Booted Warbler as soon as I reached the proper area, among a variety of other reed warblers. Drab little brown birds these all are, but they have nice voices. However, I shortly thereafter found the absolute antithesis of a reed warbler: two European Bee-eaters. I had always dreamed of seeing this bird; looking in my enormous 5-pound book about birds of the world in elementary school I had fantasized about the places that they lived and when I first went to Europe in 2016, I had looked at their images in the bird book wistfully, knowing that in March there was no chance to see them. Coming to Moscow, the odds of seeing one seemed low looking at eBird, and nine weeks with only two reports in the entire Oblast led me to believe I simply could not see one.

Now that I have seen one, I don’t even know how I should feel. In every respect, my seeing them was entirely common place, just like any other bird sighting: I saw a distant bird on a wire, hoped for a shrike since I always hope for a shrike, and immediately decided it wasn’t one. I got a bit closer and secured the identification, took a few bad pictures, and then it flew away. But this was a bee-eater, this was far better than a shrike, and so, what now? Ну что? I had a similar if not even more strong experience when I first saw a hoopoe in Buryatia.

I had directions from a fellow birder, and so far they were good: he had predicted the Booted warbler, and in the following stand of trees he had correctly predicted that I would see multiple species of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers had been something of a nemesis for me before I met this particular person, who helped me, and after seeing all of these I was sated. A bit further up I turned into the actual floodplain, where I found the two desired tern species, White-winged and Whiskered, right where they were supposed to be, as well as some other water birds. I had regrettably come a bit too late for shorebirds, which I consistently failed to see many of on this entire trip to Russia, but I did find at least one, and by luck it was a new one. I looked for a purported Barred Warbler without success, and listened to the chorus of Sedge and Marsh Warblers all around me. Terns loudly screeched, and the guttural wail of a Spotted Crake could be heard coming from deep in the reeds. Then I was supposed to turn. I couldn’t find the spot, but I saw what looked like could be a trail through some grasses, and I headed down there.

This turned out to be a mistake. I stepped over a log to get to the trail and fell straight into muddy water. Deep muddy water, probably three feet at least. I had prepared for such a situation where my shoes got wet by bringing an extra pair, but not for this. Only my backpack avoided to cold touch of the murky depths, as I fell forward, meaning that my copy of the Kukotsky Enigma and my extra pair of shoes survived. Everything else got wet. I frantically checked my passport, but it was ok thank goodness. I then tried to turn my camera on. No response. I dried it some, still nothing. It was ruined. I then tried my phone. Also completely unresponsive. For this reason, some of the pictures on this post are not my own: as of writing, I haven’t been able to recover any data from my phone, on which all of my pictures of the floodplain were taken. Fortunately, Google had backed up all of my Siberia pictures from my phone, so those were saved; also, the SD card in my camera remained functional, so I was able to retrieve my bird pictures.

But this all happened later; at this moment, my entire body was soaking wet, I had walked about four miles from any sort of transportation home, and my map, which had been on my phone, was no more. Somehow, I managed not to panic. I calmly tried to dry anything I could and began to return. The trip was arduous, as weighing on me more than my fifteen pound backpack was the broken camera around my neck and the broken phone on my pocket. But in the end I was sitting on a sofa in the MSU lounge, recalling this whole story, and now here I am typing it up.

The process of repairing what was lost is still ongoing. After a week of trying I finally bought a new phone, an experience that could make its own blog. The fate of the camera is still up in the air. I have tried several programs for extracting data from a dead phone, but none have worked. There still may be a few more to try when I get home. But more prescient for this post is the memory left. The excursion was a bizarre mix of emotions, from ecstasy to panic and fear to calm resolve, and coming to terms with them all immediately afterwards was difficult. Now, I more or less have accepted what happened, but I am too close to the event to understand how I will remember it going forward. In The Kukotsky Enigma, there is a character with dementia who can only remember fragments of ideas about herself, but memory can be a strange thing sometimes even for healthy people. And I can only wonder what will be remembered thirty years from now about the Vinogradovskaya floodplain.  

Source 1:

Зубакин, В.  “Приглашаем на орнитологическую экскурсию в Виноградовскую пойму”. Союз Охраны Птиц России. Retrieved from http://www.rbcu.ru/news/29909/.  Accessed 7 June, 2019.

Source 2:

Rumiantseva, Nadezhda. “Ст. Хлыстуновка”. My Life: Путешествия Железной Дороги. 6 August, 2012. Retrieved from https://tokatema.livejournal.com/33144.html. Accessed 7 June, 2019. Note that this is absolutely not a picture of the train I was on, as it is not even a Moscow train. That said, it looks very similar.

Source 3:

Retrieved from: https://ebird.org/map/eubeat1?neg=true&env.minX=&env.minY=&env.maxX=&env.maxY=&zh=false&gp=false&ev=Z&mr=1-12&bmo=1&emo=12&yr=cur

There isn’t a real Russian word for a birder: all that exists is the bizarre word borrowed from English, бёрдер, comically pronounced “byorder”. Most Russians would not know this word, however, so when traveling in Siberia I was introduced as орнитолог, or ornithologist, but the two are not the same. An ornithologist is a type of biologist who specializes in birds, while a birder is a hobbyist who actively seeks birds. For those unacquainted with them, the habits of birders may seem a little strange, particularly the obsession with lists; keeping track of all the birds one has seen in their life seems realistic, for their home state, sure, but keeping a list for a five-mile radius circle around your house? Or of all birds seen from a bike? The possibilities are endless.

Obviously, when this trip started, I immediately began a list for Russia and for Moscow city, but I had another goal as well. Generally, lists are only of species, but I also wanted to visit as many different places as possible in Moscow. But hold up, is that actually a place? According to a reading we did (1), there is a big difference between space and place. I’m not going to attempt to outline the entire article, but very roughly the idea is that there are spaces, which exist in the actual world, such as geographical spaces, or in the cultural world, such as the strict set up of Orthodox churches. On the other hand, there are places, which are constructed in the mind of the individual, with the prime example being the home. I guess it’s probably safer to call them “locations”. Maybe if we look at some of them it will become apparent whether they qualify as place or not.

Some of the most far-flung locations that I’ve visited for birds in Moscow city proper are Izmailovsky Park, Bitsevsky Park, and Tsaritsyno. For the record, I’m not recommending any of these areas: Izmailovsky Park is unnervingly close to a rather bad neighborhood and Bitsevsky Park used to have a resident serial killer. But in any case, I ended up at each of these places at some point, and the way which I reacted to them had less to do with what was actually there and more to do with what I expected to be there. Somehow, eBird had given me the impression that Izmailovsky Park would have shorebirds. Thus, I looked for all of the bodies of water on the map, calculated how long it would take to cover them all, and set off, with my aim being to find sandpipers, plovers, and all those little birds that scurry at the water’s edge. Alas, none were to be found, but instead I did find a good assortment of forest birds and ducks.

On the subject of ducks, that was what I was supposed to find at Tsarytsino, and I did find a few, but there ended up being more at Kolomenskoye, where I wasn’t expecting any, and in addition to the ones I had at Izmailovsky the entire trip to Tsarytsino proved pointless in terms of ducks. However, I did find honey-buzzards there, a somewhat rare raptor*, in addition to some chattery little warbler-friends. Of all of these three locations, only a Bitsevsky Park did I find what I was expecting: many interesting species of forest birds abounded there. So what? Somehow, I was adding additional meaning to the bare geographical and cultural contexts of these parks by imagining them as containing certain birds, which in turn elicits a unique emotional response to me. I say unique, because other birders would react differently to the same birds, since they have seen different birds than me and had different experiences with them. Thus, I am sort of constructing place, but the place that I create to not correspond to the reality of what exists in that space. So in reality, these locations ended up remaining spaces which I traversed and by which I was often surprised or confused by what I saw since I was expecting something else.

On the other hand, the locations closer to home that I more often visit are much closer to actual places, since my sense of what is there is more acute. I have no clue whether a Bluethroat is expected at Tsaritsyno, but at the wasteland behind MSU I know that any singing flycatcher is almost certainly a Bluethroat, since they are common there. Each time I visit, I expect to see a Bluethroat, and while for that species I have yet to be disappointed after 11 trips there, for others I may see a species even only once, like the Little-Ringed Plovers. Yet I store the memory of that species and it becomes irrevocably linked in my mind to the location, even when it is not literally present in the space I think of it when I am there. This is the more accurate type of place which I establish after repeatedly birding an area; I have a very strong and individual emotional connection to each location; in fact, every part of every location.

When I walk through, say, the Park to the 50th anniversary of the revolution, I first pass the trees where I heard my first Greenish Warbler, a cause of excitement, then move to the pond where I should keep my eyes open for shelducks or Tufted Ducks, as they are often there, and recall how when it was frozen I used to see Caspian Gulls there. I then proceed to the river, where I remember the redpolls that were here in the winter and later how I saw an Icterine Warbler in a nearby bush. I think, well this patch should be a productive patch, a nice patch, And so on. These birds are not necessarily present in the moment, but I still feel emotions connected to them. Thus, these sorts of locations I consider more fully places. In any case, connecting to areas based on the birds present in them allows me to experience them in a different way, which is part of the reason that birding is so fulfilling for me.

*As a fellow Moscow birder has noted, raptors in Moscow proper are generally rare, even those that are abundant just an hour outside the city (e.g. Black Kite, Common Buzzard).

1 Relph, Edward. “Place and Space”. In Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976. Reprinted 2008. As with my last post, I want to express that I’m not trying to comment academically on serious works and subjects such as this (about which much has been written), and that my use of them is fairly light-hearted