Pleistocene Park 2024 spring update

Dear Friends

The spring is about to start in the Pleistocene Park and I think it is time to tell you how the winter went, what we been doing in terms of Park development and what plans we have for the future.

Winter wasn’t too cold or snowy (especially first part of it), so overall animals felt themselves good.  We did not have any new animals in the park during the winter and no one was born yet (but hoping to see some babies soon). However we did have quiet a lot of activities.

First of all we started the activities to expand our rewilding efforts beyond the Pleistocene Park. Around 500km west of the Park there is a territory where live native Yakut people who maintain traditional lifestyle and herd around 1000 horses and couple hundred of cows. Their pastures are based on the series of drained lakes (because of permafrost degradation drained lakes are relatively common local feature). After the lake is drained bottoms of those lakes are quickly getting overgrown by grasses and herbs and becoming a productive pastures.  In the last couple decades in that region several new lakes drained (including one huge lake with 15km diameter). And now they have lost of great pastures (we in the Park can only dream of those), but they have relatively little animals and little animals variety. Cows they mostly keep in barns and only horses are on the pastures all year. So since I was there in 2020 (we bought some horses from those people back then) I had an idea of getting them bison too.  On top of that head of the local horse herd also expressed the interest in those animals. And since then I was looking for an option to make it happen. Since last year we received some financial support from our new sponsor (Melnichenko Foundation) I decided to make an expedition this march and bring some steppe bison to them as well. March was chosen because unlike Pleistocene Park which is connected with the world through sea port and rivers, and also airport on top of that, Yakut territory doesn’t have any connection with the big world. Only helicopters and winter road which is open from January to April.

So the idea was to import bison from Europe and then just take them by the truck all the way to the horse herders. However our plan didn’t work out since the bison we paid the money for couldn’t make it because of the sanctions situation between EU and Russia. I hope we solved the problem and those bison will finally make it to Russia next month, but it is already too late to take animals to Aleko-Kuel (name of the horse herders village). So we had to develop the plan B.  Here we received quiet a big help from Yakutian government (Yakutia is the state where Pleistocene Park is located). Not far from Yakutsk they have a national reserve where they breed American wood bison which can from Canada almost 20 years ago.  And with united efforts we managed to get agreement that government will provide the animals and we will take care of the transportation.  So around 20th of March we picked up bison near Yakutsk and took them on the truck all the way to Aleko-Kuel. Winter road in this region is not too great, but expedition went well and biggest issue we had overall was flat tyre in the big truck. Distance to travel was around 2000km and we did this trip in 7-8 days. Which is good for this route. During the unload bison did make an attempt to escape from the quarantine, but native herders have a big experience dealing with animals and all of escapers were quickly returned. Some images from the expedition are provided below.

Our second big activity in the second part of the winter was to collect scientific data that arctic grazing is good for the climate change. Just 2 days ago we finished collaborative research in the park where scientists from Russian institute of Atmospheric Physics did drone surveys in the park to measure albedo and temperature regime of the territory depending on grazing.  I think we will make those data into the publication but can briefly say that grazing which opens canopy of shrubs is dramatically increasing albedo and decreasing temperatures. Very noticeable effect where camels we brought been grazing in the last couple winters.

Additionally we did a massive campaign to collect frozen soil cores to measure the changes in carbon contents in the soil with grazing. Here we did a lot of work in the Park and also at the sites in Aleko-Kuel. Here can say that old pastures where Yakut people graze their animals for decades/centuries have a massive amount of carbon in the soil. Roughly 25 times more carbon per square meter comparing with the carbon stored in the aboveground biomass in the local forests.   In the Park we have good data too. Hope we can get all this published in the next year or two.

So now about the plans. As I already said bison from Europe are hopefully coming in May and they will be going to the Park (since we already brought some to Aleko-Kuel’). We originally didn’t have plans to bring bison this year, but since we arranged some extra, it will be a nice bonus.

In parallel we have 16 camels waiting to be picked up from the same farm we brought camels in 2021. So all those animals are hopefully will travel together on 2 big trucks all the way to upper stream of the Kolyma and then be taken to the park by mid June. Fingers crossed everything will go as planned.

Our next expedition to get animals will be much more complicated.  I think I already mentioned before we are preparing a sea class musk ox transporter boat in Vladivostok. By august it should make it to our local town and from here we are planning to start our 2000km expedition to Big Begichev island near Taimyr peninsula to catch musk ox. Even on my scale of craziness the plan is getting top rating😊  Will keep you updated. By the way we named the ship – The Arc.  Couldn’t think of anything better😊

And our last but not least of the activities I will mention is Park territory expansion. We need to build 55km of fence in the next two years. For that we already ordered metal net, and planning to prepare and transport 12000 logs for the posts. It is a huge work, which require tug boats, barges, bulldozers with drills etc.  Don’t know if we will be able to make it on time. But we are going to try hard.

I think those are all updates for now. Thanks everyone for supporting us, and greetings to new supporters. For understandable reasons we had a big decline in supporters since 2022, but my friend Luke Griswold got his movie about the Pleistocene Park to Youtube and this brought us quiet some new supporters.   By the way warning – if you are working in the Pleistocene Park for too long you get addiction and can’t stop doing it. Luke gave up movie making and is now trying to create Pleistocene Park 2 in Alaska.  I fully support his efforts and effort of scientists who are working with him (though progress is still very little so far).

All the best

Nikita