Tales of field biologists: Friday post
I wrote this article at the request of several members of our respected community.
It must be said that the actual biology here serves more as a background: there are no biological details or riddles in these stories, but their heroes would not be engaged in biology, these stories would never have happened. I heard some of these stories from my parents, who traveled around the country quite well, some from colleagues, and in some I myself took direct part. I did not include here the stories too well-known: for example, the difficulties of the family life of Karl Linnaeus and his wife Sary-Lisa can easily be found on the Internet without my efforts. Of course, I cannot be responsible for the fact that there are no such stories anywhere on the web - moreover, I once published some of them myself somewhere, but they clearly did not receive wide popularity, and now it turned out to be easier for me to write them again than remembering exactly where the text is.
Picture for. Great cormorants. They are mentioned in the latest story. Photographed on the Barents Sea, on the way to Gremikha.
I apologize to everyone who will not be interested, or whose expectations I could not justify. In the end, the pianist plays as best he can.
')
Well: let's start.
* * *
Our service is both dangerous and difficult ...
I was told this story, which I regard as the most outstanding of the spies catching story, as an already established element of folklore: accordingly, I cannot vouch for its accuracy and accuracy of details. And in all fairness, it should be started on a rather sad note.
A year ago, the Faculty of Biology at Moscow State University buried Professor Felix Yanovich Dzerzhinsky, an excellent specialist in morphology and comparative anatomy of vertebrates. He received his name in honor of his grandfather, Felix Edmundovich. No, not namesake. The grandson of the founder of the Cheka, from childhood, was fond of ornithology and ornithology, and then the zoology of vertebrates, and devoted his whole life, reaching without exaggeration outstanding results.
The story itself happened in the post-war years, when Moscow ornithologists decided to conduct an all-Moscow survey of corvids. Of course, such an event could not pass by an active participant in the biological circle. Felix took over the account in the territory where his family still lived. Kremlin and Red Square.
On the appointed day, young nationalists with binoculars and notepads scattered all over Moscow: the simultaneous coverage of a large territory gave good chances for a reliable estimate of numbers. Further imagine the picture: Red Square. A boy who carefully looks through his binoculars, then writes something in a notebook, then looks again ...
Two men approached the boy, as they say, in civilian clothes.
- Hello boy.
- Hello, uncles.
“What are you doing, boy, what are you doing here?”
- And I, uncles, think crows.
- And you, boy, where are you from? Where do you live?
- In the Kremlin.
- What is your name?
- Felix Dzerzhinsky.
- Well, let's go, boy ...
... They apologized, they say, for a very long time.
Accounting for corvids in Moscow has not been conducted for a very long time. But the tradition of urban surveys itself did not die: for example, annually in the twentieth of January in Moscow, wintering waterfowl surveys are conducted - Moscow reservoirs, where there is hope for open water, are distributed among volunteers and examined on a pre-assigned day off composition. And literally in a few days, on May 24 and 25, the traditional annual accounting of singing nightingales will be held in the cities of Russia.
* * *
What's in a name…
This story was told to me by my mother, and she refers to the very beginning of the sixties. Zvenigorod biostation, field student practice. Entomological excursion. An elderly professor leads a crowd of students, from time to time catching some insect, showing the audience and expecting from it, the audience, the definition. On the field road crawling medium-sized beetle.
- Fine copy! And who, comrade students, will tell me what type this specimen belongs to?
Silence.
- I taught you so bad? Masha, tell me the name of this beetle!
Masha crumples and blushes, but is silent.
- amazing. Maybe you, Fedor? ..
Silence.
- Victor, you're going to the department of entomology. You should know the name of this beetle! Oh well! Well, that's right, Khrushcheva is a pot-bellied maize dad, and there is nothing to blush here!
For the sake of justice, I should note that I don’t know a beetle with such a name, and Googleknows it, but it does n’t find that either. In general, Khrushchi are a rather extensive subfamily, and there are many pests among various crops. In particular, the well-known May beetles belong to the wormholes.
* * *
When you knew, from what rubbish ...
The beginning of this story was told to me by his father, he was her direct participant. A physicist by education and main occupation, he spent his holidays, hiring various expeditions. In particular, he worked quite a lot at first with S.M. Ouspensky, and then with SM Belikov on the study of polar bears. In the early 1970s, a series of expeditions to Wrangel Island established the key role of the island for a polar bear, it turned out to be a place for mass wintering of pregnant bears, a kind of “maternity hospital”. In 1976, a reserve was established on the island.
It was before the organization of the reserve, at the beginning of one of the field seasons. During dinner at the base camp told jokes. It’s not that usually jokes are not told, but there is such a thing as a joke of the season on expeditions.
The joke of that season sounded like that.
A patient comes to the doctor with a complaint about a little dwarf who dreams of him and asks if the patient has written today. Hearing a negative answer, the gnome offered to pee - with a predictable result. The doctor, on reflection, offered to answer the gnome that the patient had already written: in response, the gnome offered to poke.
And as usual, a mini-folklore has formed around the joke of the season.
- It would be necessary to get out outside, the gnome waits ...
- Do you feel disturbed by the dwarfs at night?
- It's good to work for today, it's time to go to the camp, and the dwarfs were waiting ...
... In the late eighties, telling this story, my father showed me the number of the almanac “Wind of wandering” with the story of a student who visited the reserve in practice.
"... A wonderful nature reserve, a wonderful island, wonderful people! We were settled in a wonderful place with the romantic name" Valley of the Dwarfs. "What imagination, what bright dreams led us to call a secluded dell with several houses named after the fairy tales in the Far Arctic ... "
“That's it,” my father said, “I happened to participate in the creation of a geographical name.”
And after his death, I heard a very, very romantic song about the Valley of the Dwarfs on Wrangel Island.
... again the cubs will return here
People and good gnomes will meet ...
* * *
By the way, in the case of songs: a no less romantic song by the author duet A. Heinz and S. Danilov "Polar Aviation" contains truly immortal, in my unenlightened view, lines.
... Polar day is nearing its end,
Dinner is getting cold on the table in the storeroom ...
* * *
Oh, the road ...
The following story was told to me at the White Sea Biological Station of Moscow State University, where I worked as an electrician for one winter. In the seventies and eighties, the character, the hero of many stories, whose last name, like most of the stories he heard, was successfully erased from my memory, worked at the biostation. I only remember that in the world he was the chairman of the Chupinsky regional auto-amateur club. According to the stories, at one time besides his personal equipment, the number of a dozen and a half, no other transport was registered at the biostation. Among this equipment was quite a working truck GAZ AA, the famous "lorry"; there was also a Rolls-Royce of the pre-war, according to legends, the year of release, in which our hero loved to roll beautiful ladies: already gathered to sit down, the ladies discovered that the floor in the car was missing, and the stately transferred leg through the threshold rose back to the ground.
In general, the history of BBS, one of the largest bio-stations in the country, built, as S.E. Shnol, "at the price of repairing an old barn," on enthusiasm, personal connections and disinterested help, deserves a separate book - and not for me to write a book.
But by the time being described, the biostation had already been financed, the station PAZ was already running, and the faculty became generous about buying a tractor. The usual wheel MTZ-80, "Belarus" - which had to somehow be delivered from the factory in Minsk. Taking the same PAZ, our hero went to Minsk. At the plant, the benefit of the equipment in the background, the unfortunate bus was cut off the ass, the tractor was removed from the wheels, put into the salon, then the ass was welded back and painted over. As the legend says, on the way back, which lasted almost a month, an enterprising comrade got rich, stopping near rural shops and approaching the peasants who usually crowded together in such places:
- Guys! Argue for a dozen, can you guess what I have on the bus?
At the same time from each mine post office he sent telegrams to the station, written with mocking verses, which I will not give here, because they were based on the local, few people outside the station understand the specifics. It was, by the way, an honest fulfillment of the director’s requirement “to keep up to date”: as to the poetic, or the prosaic form, no requirements were voiced. By tradition, the telegrams were read aloud by the director at the morning meetings, in the presence of all the permanent employees of the biostation.
* * *
The word is not a sparrow!
This story also dates back to the days of my mom's student youth. At that time she took part in several expeditions in Western Siberia. We studied mosquitoes. It is worth noting that the method of counting described by mom itself pulls on the bike: the counting was carried out as follows. Under a gauze bell with tied up walls a young man rose, stripped to the waist. And stood motionless a minute. After that, the external assistant dissolved the strings, the walls of the bell fell, and the young man was very careful not to damage, with a pair of tweezers, he collected all the mosquitoes from himself and from the inner surface of the bell into the tube. There was also a record of drinking blood: then the young man had to wait until all the mosquitoes inside the bell got drunk completely and fell off his gauze walls, and only then began to stir. Brr ...
But the story itself is not connected with mosquitoes. For the expedition, a remote site of one of the timber industry enterprises was chosen: a watch, two houses, in one of which the expedition was located. In the other, respectively, lived a team of lumberjacks, and they were equipped with a photo room: a dark corner of the house hung with blankets. Loggers, it must be said, were mainly composed of a contingent that was denied entry into the cities. Women, respectively, for the most part they did not even see in the pictures, since the pictures were not particularly available. As a result, according to my mother's words, the attitude towards women there developed such that chivalrous romances could safely take leave at their own expense.
And some day, when the team worked on the plot, and the two attendants cooked in the house, my mother asked to change films in the photo room: well, she sat quietly behind the blankets, not visible to anyone until the team returned for lunch.
- Petrovich, tudy your rastudy, imagine what today Vasya uchudil?
Petrovich already caught his breath.
- Nick, so your peretak! What fucking cunning fuck are you talking about here? We have a woman in the house!
- Petrovich, your mother to the left, to the right, along and two times across: it was necessary to speak at once!
After that, which is characteristic, there was not a word of obscenities.
* * *
Ass there, but no words, or the severe Pomeranian toponymy
At the end, I will not even tell the story, but a toponymic joke. In '92, we worked in Porja lip of the White Sea. In the west, the lips of the maps indicate the Peduny Peninsula and the islands of Peruña. In principle, well, they are marked and indicated, what little is the name. But a little later, an employee of the Kandalaksha Nature Reserve said that when he drove the Pomorskaya grandmother, who lived in that village, to the former village of Porya, the island called her a few other words along the way. Curious, he found out that the names of both the peninsula and the islands, and of the former village * at the base of the peninsula, were derived from one word. Perduni they were, these islands. And Peninsula Perdunov. And the village Perdunikha.
Inspired by the new knowledge, we stuck to the cards. The island of Rishchev on Kolvitsky Lake immediately came under suspicion. Hmmm ... Well, yes. Imagine yourself in the Pomors. Going on oars away from the coast for a few hours, then this island, past which it will not work, further turn into the strait, and a few more hours of progress ... It seems that the letter D disappeared from the name. Polls of old-timers confirmed the hunch. Apparently, the map makers were shy people.
And already much later I had a chance to understand where the name of the two small islands in the middle of Kandalaksha Bay came from. Crossbag and Bristlebag. No, in order to take a breather with all the comforts, there are islands much more pleasant nearby. And on these birds just live. Great cormorants. And the cormorant is such a bird, in some way specific ... In general, passing by these buckwheats on the leeward side, you immediately understand where the name came from.
* In fact, of course, historically it was a forest village, built in 1947, but for some reason they called it a village.
Well, that's probably enough. I apologize again if I disappointed anyone; Yes, and for the fact that somehow did not fit the majority of stories worthy of pictures, it is also good to apologize.
Great weekend to everyone!
It must be said that the actual biology here serves more as a background: there are no biological details or riddles in these stories, but their heroes would not be engaged in biology, these stories would never have happened. I heard some of these stories from my parents, who traveled around the country quite well, some from colleagues, and in some I myself took direct part. I did not include here the stories too well-known: for example, the difficulties of the family life of Karl Linnaeus and his wife Sary-Lisa can easily be found on the Internet without my efforts. Of course, I cannot be responsible for the fact that there are no such stories anywhere on the web - moreover, I once published some of them myself somewhere, but they clearly did not receive wide popularity, and now it turned out to be easier for me to write them again than remembering exactly where the text is.
Picture for. Great cormorants. They are mentioned in the latest story. Photographed on the Barents Sea, on the way to Gremikha.
I apologize to everyone who will not be interested, or whose expectations I could not justify. In the end, the pianist plays as best he can.
')
Well: let's start.
* * *
Our service is both dangerous and difficult ...
I was told this story, which I regard as the most outstanding of the spies catching story, as an already established element of folklore: accordingly, I cannot vouch for its accuracy and accuracy of details. And in all fairness, it should be started on a rather sad note.
A year ago, the Faculty of Biology at Moscow State University buried Professor Felix Yanovich Dzerzhinsky, an excellent specialist in morphology and comparative anatomy of vertebrates. He received his name in honor of his grandfather, Felix Edmundovich. No, not namesake. The grandson of the founder of the Cheka, from childhood, was fond of ornithology and ornithology, and then the zoology of vertebrates, and devoted his whole life, reaching without exaggeration outstanding results.
The story itself happened in the post-war years, when Moscow ornithologists decided to conduct an all-Moscow survey of corvids. Of course, such an event could not pass by an active participant in the biological circle. Felix took over the account in the territory where his family still lived. Kremlin and Red Square.
On the appointed day, young nationalists with binoculars and notepads scattered all over Moscow: the simultaneous coverage of a large territory gave good chances for a reliable estimate of numbers. Further imagine the picture: Red Square. A boy who carefully looks through his binoculars, then writes something in a notebook, then looks again ...
Two men approached the boy, as they say, in civilian clothes.
- Hello boy.
- Hello, uncles.
“What are you doing, boy, what are you doing here?”
- And I, uncles, think crows.
- And you, boy, where are you from? Where do you live?
- In the Kremlin.
- What is your name?
- Felix Dzerzhinsky.
- Well, let's go, boy ...
... They apologized, they say, for a very long time.
Accounting for corvids in Moscow has not been conducted for a very long time. But the tradition of urban surveys itself did not die: for example, annually in the twentieth of January in Moscow, wintering waterfowl surveys are conducted - Moscow reservoirs, where there is hope for open water, are distributed among volunteers and examined on a pre-assigned day off composition. And literally in a few days, on May 24 and 25, the traditional annual accounting of singing nightingales will be held in the cities of Russia.
* * *
What's in a name…
This story was told to me by my mother, and she refers to the very beginning of the sixties. Zvenigorod biostation, field student practice. Entomological excursion. An elderly professor leads a crowd of students, from time to time catching some insect, showing the audience and expecting from it, the audience, the definition. On the field road crawling medium-sized beetle.
- Fine copy! And who, comrade students, will tell me what type this specimen belongs to?
Silence.
- I taught you so bad? Masha, tell me the name of this beetle!
Masha crumples and blushes, but is silent.
- amazing. Maybe you, Fedor? ..
Silence.
- Victor, you're going to the department of entomology. You should know the name of this beetle! Oh well! Well, that's right, Khrushcheva is a pot-bellied maize dad, and there is nothing to blush here!
For the sake of justice, I should note that I don’t know a beetle with such a name, and Google
* * *
When you knew, from what rubbish ...
The beginning of this story was told to me by his father, he was her direct participant. A physicist by education and main occupation, he spent his holidays, hiring various expeditions. In particular, he worked quite a lot at first with S.M. Ouspensky, and then with SM Belikov on the study of polar bears. In the early 1970s, a series of expeditions to Wrangel Island established the key role of the island for a polar bear, it turned out to be a place for mass wintering of pregnant bears, a kind of “maternity hospital”. In 1976, a reserve was established on the island.
It was before the organization of the reserve, at the beginning of one of the field seasons. During dinner at the base camp told jokes. It’s not that usually jokes are not told, but there is such a thing as a joke of the season on expeditions.
The joke of that season sounded like that.
A patient comes to the doctor with a complaint about a little dwarf who dreams of him and asks if the patient has written today. Hearing a negative answer, the gnome offered to pee - with a predictable result. The doctor, on reflection, offered to answer the gnome that the patient had already written: in response, the gnome offered to poke.
And as usual, a mini-folklore has formed around the joke of the season.
- It would be necessary to get out outside, the gnome waits ...
- Do you feel disturbed by the dwarfs at night?
- It's good to work for today, it's time to go to the camp, and the dwarfs were waiting ...
... In the late eighties, telling this story, my father showed me the number of the almanac “Wind of wandering” with the story of a student who visited the reserve in practice.
"... A wonderful nature reserve, a wonderful island, wonderful people! We were settled in a wonderful place with the romantic name" Valley of the Dwarfs. "What imagination, what bright dreams led us to call a secluded dell with several houses named after the fairy tales in the Far Arctic ... "
“That's it,” my father said, “I happened to participate in the creation of a geographical name.”
And after his death, I heard a very, very romantic song about the Valley of the Dwarfs on Wrangel Island.
... again the cubs will return here
People and good gnomes will meet ...
Playing white bear cubs. Filmed father
* * *
By the way, in the case of songs: a no less romantic song by the author duet A. Heinz and S. Danilov "Polar Aviation" contains truly immortal, in my unenlightened view, lines.
... Polar day is nearing its end,
Dinner is getting cold on the table in the storeroom ...
* * *
Oh, the road ...
The following story was told to me at the White Sea Biological Station of Moscow State University, where I worked as an electrician for one winter. In the seventies and eighties, the character, the hero of many stories, whose last name, like most of the stories he heard, was successfully erased from my memory, worked at the biostation. I only remember that in the world he was the chairman of the Chupinsky regional auto-amateur club. According to the stories, at one time besides his personal equipment, the number of a dozen and a half, no other transport was registered at the biostation. Among this equipment was quite a working truck GAZ AA, the famous "lorry"; there was also a Rolls-Royce of the pre-war, according to legends, the year of release, in which our hero loved to roll beautiful ladies: already gathered to sit down, the ladies discovered that the floor in the car was missing, and the stately transferred leg through the threshold rose back to the ground.
In general, the history of BBS, one of the largest bio-stations in the country, built, as S.E. Shnol, "at the price of repairing an old barn," on enthusiasm, personal connections and disinterested help, deserves a separate book - and not for me to write a book.
But by the time being described, the biostation had already been financed, the station PAZ was already running, and the faculty became generous about buying a tractor. The usual wheel MTZ-80, "Belarus" - which had to somehow be delivered from the factory in Minsk. Taking the same PAZ, our hero went to Minsk. At the plant, the benefit of the equipment in the background, the unfortunate bus was cut off the ass, the tractor was removed from the wheels, put into the salon, then the ass was welded back and painted over. As the legend says, on the way back, which lasted almost a month, an enterprising comrade got rich, stopping near rural shops and approaching the peasants who usually crowded together in such places:
- Guys! Argue for a dozen, can you guess what I have on the bus?
At the same time from each mine post office he sent telegrams to the station, written with mocking verses, which I will not give here, because they were based on the local, few people outside the station understand the specifics. It was, by the way, an honest fulfillment of the director’s requirement “to keep up to date”: as to the poetic, or the prosaic form, no requirements were voiced. By tradition, the telegrams were read aloud by the director at the morning meetings, in the presence of all the permanent employees of the biostation.
* * *
The word is not a sparrow!
This story also dates back to the days of my mom's student youth. At that time she took part in several expeditions in Western Siberia. We studied mosquitoes. It is worth noting that the method of counting described by mom itself pulls on the bike: the counting was carried out as follows. Under a gauze bell with tied up walls a young man rose, stripped to the waist. And stood motionless a minute. After that, the external assistant dissolved the strings, the walls of the bell fell, and the young man was very careful not to damage, with a pair of tweezers, he collected all the mosquitoes from himself and from the inner surface of the bell into the tube. There was also a record of drinking blood: then the young man had to wait until all the mosquitoes inside the bell got drunk completely and fell off his gauze walls, and only then began to stir. Brr ...
But the story itself is not connected with mosquitoes. For the expedition, a remote site of one of the timber industry enterprises was chosen: a watch, two houses, in one of which the expedition was located. In the other, respectively, lived a team of lumberjacks, and they were equipped with a photo room: a dark corner of the house hung with blankets. Loggers, it must be said, were mainly composed of a contingent that was denied entry into the cities. Women, respectively, for the most part they did not even see in the pictures, since the pictures were not particularly available. As a result, according to my mother's words, the attitude towards women there developed such that chivalrous romances could safely take leave at their own expense.
And some day, when the team worked on the plot, and the two attendants cooked in the house, my mother asked to change films in the photo room: well, she sat quietly behind the blankets, not visible to anyone until the team returned for lunch.
- Petrovich, tudy your rastudy, imagine what today Vasya uchudil?
Petrovich already caught his breath.
- Nick, so your peretak! What fucking cunning fuck are you talking about here? We have a woman in the house!
- Petrovich, your mother to the left, to the right, along and two times across: it was necessary to speak at once!
After that, which is characteristic, there was not a word of obscenities.
* * *
Ass there, but no words, or the severe Pomeranian toponymy
At the end, I will not even tell the story, but a toponymic joke. In '92, we worked in Porja lip of the White Sea. In the west, the lips of the maps indicate the Peduny Peninsula and the islands of Peruña. In principle, well, they are marked and indicated, what little is the name. But a little later, an employee of the Kandalaksha Nature Reserve said that when he drove the Pomorskaya grandmother, who lived in that village, to the former village of Porya, the island called her a few other words along the way. Curious, he found out that the names of both the peninsula and the islands, and of the former village * at the base of the peninsula, were derived from one word. Perduni they were, these islands. And Peninsula Perdunov. And the village Perdunikha.
Inspired by the new knowledge, we stuck to the cards. The island of Rishchev on Kolvitsky Lake immediately came under suspicion. Hmmm ... Well, yes. Imagine yourself in the Pomors. Going on oars away from the coast for a few hours, then this island, past which it will not work, further turn into the strait, and a few more hours of progress ... It seems that the letter D disappeared from the name. Polls of old-timers confirmed the hunch. Apparently, the map makers were shy people.
And already much later I had a chance to understand where the name of the two small islands in the middle of Kandalaksha Bay came from. Crossbag and Bristlebag. No, in order to take a breather with all the comforts, there are islands much more pleasant nearby. And on these birds just live. Great cormorants. And the cormorant is such a bird, in some way specific ... In general, passing by these buckwheats on the leeward side, you immediately understand where the name came from.
* In fact, of course, historically it was a forest village, built in 1947, but for some reason they called it a village.
Well, that's probably enough. I apologize again if I disappointed anyone; Yes, and for the fact that somehow did not fit the majority of stories worthy of pictures, it is also good to apologize.
Great weekend to everyone!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/394169/
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