by Todd Katzner
August 11, 2003
Page 6 : June 8 - Kazanbaisi Forest
It didn’t rain last night! Finally. We spend the morning walking around Kostanay with Anatoly and Julia, letting the steppe dry a bit. After lunch we load up the Niva and head into the field with Evgeny. This time we are going to some forests closer to Kostanay, so that Evgeny can check these nests, so that I can get a sense for the different types of forest habitat that eagles in north Kazakhstan use, and so that we can get more eagle feathers on which Jamie can do genetic analyses.
We drive about 50 km south of Kostanay to some forests there and, although the roads are wet and muddy, they are not impassable. We manage to visit three imperial Eagle territories. One has been taken over by a Sea Eagle, and we find feathers and new nest construction, but fail to observe any birds. The other two territories are still occupied by Imperial Eagles, and in both cases one bird (most likely the female in the pair) sits very tightly on the nests when we visit. When eagles do this, it can indicate that the birds have very young chicks and they don’t want to leave them alone in the nest (young chicks are unable to maintain a constant body temperature (thermoregulate) and so are vulnerable to heat and cold they can encounter if a parent does not protect them at all times). We observe these nests from a distance and collect feathers from roosts near the nests. The most remarkable thing about the day though is not the eagles, it is the mosquitoes. They are numerous and aggressive. Evgeny and I are not particularly vulnerable to them, and we each only get a few bites. Jamie, however, seems to be a prime mosquito target, and by the end of the day her face is puffy with mosquito bites. We resolve to get her a head net and some bug spray for the next trip to the field. At the end of the day we head back to Kostanay.
The Kazanbaisi forest (where we were) is of a different type than at the Naurzum Reserve. Here there is also often sandy soil, but this soil is often black and of a different type than any we see at Naurzum. The forest is patchy—Evgeny says that this is a type typical of what is seen in forest steppe transition zones in central Asia. Additionally there has recently (five years ago) been a massive forest fire in this area and a large proportion of the trees were burned. When trees burn in this area people follow the fire and cut the dry wood to use as fuel. This is occurring on a large scale right now, and at all three of the eagle territories we visited, the original nest tree had been cut down and the eagles had built new nests in new trees nearby. While this seems like a good solution, the problem we face is that there are not so many big trees remaining and the eagles require those big trees in which they can build nests. At a fourth territory that we visited the nest tree had been cut down and there were no more big trees anywhere in the area. We were unable to find an eagle nest in that territory in that year.
Next Page : June 9 - Barovoe and Karagai Forests
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