Section 8. Khakassia – steppe, forest-steppe and sub-taiga.

Days 18,19 and 20: (August 29,30 and 31) Meeting scientific staff of Khakasskii State Nature Reserve. Excursion to the reserve, study steppe habitat and Lake Itkul in the Minushinskaya Basin. Ecology and archeology. Excursion to Iusskii National Park. Forest steppe and sub-taiga. Unique ecosystems. Excursions to other sections of the reserve, Lake Bele. Visit to ethnographical museum in Shira. Sauna, party.

Shira, 29 August, 8 p.m.

This morning, we woke up to a completely new landscape. Our abominably ugly and jack-built cottages stand on a gentle ridge, overlooking a large, wide valley with a couple of lakes in it. The closest one of these lakes is Shira Lake, which is a salt lake, and has become what the Russians call a ‘kurort’. During the Soviet era, it was one of the centrally organized vacation destinations for workers. The town that grew up around the spa facilities contains several large buildings that function as hostels, and one very well designed spa with a pool and a series of saunas and ‘banyas’. These days, the facilities are used off and on by groups of Russians from Siberian cities who come here for health reasons, believing that bathing in the mineral rich water of the lake will cure them of everything from alcoholism to cancer. Our interests in the region and the lakes are obviously different. Shira sits in the middle of the15,000 square km Minushinskaya Basin surrounded by mountains and ridges. Due to its low precipitation, it is an area with steppe vegetation and a number of lakes fed by rivers running out of the surrounding forested mountains. Some of these lakes are salt lakes, whereas others, usually at somewhat higher elevation are freshwater lakes. The lakes and associated marshes attract large numbers of migratory birds at this time of year, and some of these wetland complexes and surrounding steppes are protected within the Khakasskii Reserve. Needless to say, on Thursday morning we were quite excited about entering the steppes of Central Asia for the first time. I could not help humming Borodin’s moody tune to myself, and dreaming about the days of Dzengis Kahn and the silk-road to China.

Shushenskoye, I Sptember, 9 p.m.

Since that morning, we have seen a lot of the Minushinskaya Basin and surrounding uplands. I love the steppes, rolling hills of mostly aeolian deposits overlaying slightly tilted palaeozoic sedimentary deposits, so that most hills have a gentle slope on one end, and a rocky, eroding outcrop on the opposite end. This geomorphology produces a very attractive landscape to hike through, with new vistas opening up as one walks over the hills, some endless ones to a distant horizon, others over ridges onto hidden lakes, or down sudden cliffs over deep valleys. And then there is the biology. Like all natural grasslands, the steppes are much more than grass. The vegetation is fascinating, and reminds me a lot of other grasslands I have seen, such as the North American prairies, and savannas in Africa and Australia. All grasslands are maintained by a combination of grazing and fire, creating a patchy sward with many competing plant species all adapted to coexist with these two dominant factors. The Khakassian steppes are different from the North American prairies, in that their annual wet season is in the summer, not the winter, which is very dry and very cold. Another major difference is that the Asian steppes are much more fragmented by mountain ranges, creating a lot of semi-isolated basins with their own conditions and flora and fauna.

We were amazed at the density of burial mounds, stone circles, megaliths and other evidence of millennia of human occupation. The oldest of these remnants of past civilizations date back as far as 35,000 years, but the vast majority are from the past 3-4,000 years, representing various nomadic grazing cultures. We had wonderful speculative discussions about the ecological history of the region with Kostya (the Moscow ecologist who is part of our team) and the scientists of the reserve. It is safe to assume that after the extinction of the Pleistocene mega-fauna, a fairly long, stable period saw the Minushinskaya Basin as steppe, with a fauna of ungulate grazers, small mammals and associated predators. It is very difficult to reconstruct the exact composition of the flora and fauna of that period, which, of course, went through wet/dry and warm/cold cycles with associated changes in the biology. However, some four millennia ago, the small stable population of hunter-gatherers was replaced by cattle, goat and sheepherders. Until fairly recently, it seems that most of the wild fauna except for the big predators such as the lion, co-existed with the domestic herds. Undoubtedly, the domesticated animals had a major effect on the vegetation and indirectly on the native fauna. Reliable ecological descriptions of the flora and fauna were not made until well into this century, when all the ungulates such as auerochs, wild horse, camel and antelopes were already locally extinct. It is well known that different grazers have different effects on the species composition of plant communities, so that we are now probably looking at a very different steppe from what we could call ‘natural’. The last half century has been even more disruptive as far as the steppe biology is concerned, in that the Soviet government forced a major transition in land use, by attempting agriculture. Much of this growing of cereals was a failure, but a fair percentage of the basin is still under various crops, and improved varieties and methods are giving encouraging results for an agricultural future.

Fortunately for those of us who like nature, many of the failed agricultural areas have been added to the reserve, and are slowly returning to native grassland. However, once the age-old surface has been plowed, it may take decades to recover a true steppe vegetation. The other problem for the reserve is that in the absence of both domestic and wild large grazing animals, the steppe ecology is changing. As more organic matter accumulates, fire becomes more prevalent, and this in turn affects the vegetation and the small mammal, bird and insect faunas. In North America, where there is a lot more money for nature reserves, we face the same problems, but can afford fencing, fire management and the maintenance of herds of bison and antelope. What they need for the Khakasskii Reserve is a managed herd of wild horses, wisent and antelopes. That, however, implies acquiring much more land, and the construction of miles of adequate fencing. For now, the Russian Federation does not have the money to do this, but the future looks good, since the population density in Khakassia is low, and there is obviously no land pressure, as thousands of hectares of steppe are barely used at all.