In the Eastern Forest

Playout date: 3 October 2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – medium use
Location: Primorskiy Kray, Russia
Other people featured: Various Foresters
Genre: Environmental
Music used: Solovenko Ukrainian Songs
Languages used: Russian, Ukrainian
Animals featured: Not many other than the ladybirds on the video, but this is the domain of
the Siberian Tiger, black bear and snow leopard. Numerous unusual forest
plants are also seen in the gallery

It’s a long story how I came to be here, and in fact I can’t go into details at it involves work – I ended up auditing the forestry operators of a territory larger than Greater London. The climate was hard and the Mosquitos were hard. I was working for China, and they needed an English speaker who knew Due Diligence and knows Russian, and they received recommendations that I was the man for the job.

Well, it took all summer five years ago, and I still have the Mosquito bites. The gallery shots show in places the anti mosquito suit they managed to bite through. suffice it to say they are simply not in the same league as the European ones.

This is one of my earliest “gallery style” films showcasing photographs and I haven’t really got the style right, they are flashing through too quickly and they’re not fading into each other as I started doing when I got the hang of it.

But still some of the photos are not too bad though I say so myself and worth a few additional comments – the foresters were very friendly folk, we spend a great few days with people that live a very close to nature way in the forest in conditions that most of us would find wearing. These are not the kind of parks you get in Europe. They are logging and replanting in forests that are being cultivated effectively for the first time. This sort of forest in Europe exists only in any size in Bialoweza, where the bison are. The fauna here is very varied, but it’s not common to see them. When I went behind a tree to go to the toilet at one point, I saw a Siberian chipmunk,  or “burunduk” – but when I told the woodsmen about it they said that when I go off to have a leak I’d better let them know so that they can cover with a rifle, because it’s when they do what I just did that they come across other “stripey animals” but ones who are more inclined to attack us than the burunduk are!

We saw cedar nut trees and manchurian nut, and those strange grape like things that you see in the woodsman’s hand – to get them he swung out over a fifty-foot drop on a tree branch, as agile as a monkey. Also you’ll see the huge ladybirds that they had there, you can see one that landed on me – they are so pick that when they land on you it feels like someone’s flicked you with their finger.

The tipped over lorry full of logs you can see in one photo there goes to show how tough the terrain is there – they basically dig their roads out as they woork the forest.

Don’t miss also near the end the home-made fitness area they made for themselves from various machine parts. It showed their skill in making do.

Scutigera -Let it not envenomate you!

 
 

Video number in my collection 72
Production date:    6 September 2006
Playout date:    20 August 2006
Camera:     Fuji Finepix
Post Production:    Windows Movie Maker – medium use
Location:    House in Lesozavodsk, Primorskiy Kraj, Siberia
Other people featured: None
Genre: Nature
Soundtrack info:    Through the Greenwood, Andrey Vinogradov
Languages used:    English titles
Animals featured:    House centipede Scutigera coleoptrata
Date added here: 10 October 2010
Number of days this video was up at time of posting: 1 512
Number of views at time of posting: 1 978
Number of views per day: 1,3
Number of comments at time of posting (don’t forget to click through to read the comments!): 17
Comments per thousand views: 8,6
Likes at time of posting: 4
Dislikes at time of posting: 1
Likes to dislikes ratio: 4,0
Votes per thousand views: 2,5
Ratio of comments to votes: 340%

 This was the first of several films I put up on my return from the Far East of Russia in 2006. I still had a very small memory card and so there is unfortunately still very little footage – which was galling as the trip was so amazing. It was at this time I started looking for solutions to make the videos longer.
 
 On the subject of these centipedes one could write rather a lot. They are certainly quite alarming creatures to find you are sharing a room with, but the people who have them in their houses don’t like them being killed, claimingthat if they were not there the problems with cockroaches or even more poisonous spiders would be far worse.  All theysuggest is to check the bed before you get in it and check your shoes before putting them on. Even if they crawl over you while you sleep, they say, you won’t be bitten if you don’t move on them. Your choice!

Personally in Russia I batted my room mate Scooties, but I did manage to tolerate them in a recent visit to France, and nothing bad happened. There were lots of insects in the French place, so I am not sure that they deserve their reputation of doing good work against all the other invertebrates…