Letters From the Cabin - A lone Russian crusader takes on the Communist bureaucracy to protect a forest home of the rare black stork

International Wildlife, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Laura Williams

THE SUMMONS came one morning in June 1984. A shiny, black Volga sedan showed up at the tiny school in Novenkoye where Igor Shpilenok taught and whisked him to the local Communist Party headquarters. There, the nervous teacher, then 24, was ushered into a room where he was ordered by the local Communist boss to prepare for a visit from First Secretary Anatoly Voystrochenko, head of the Bryansk Region, a republic in western Russia.

Voystrochenko had read Igor's pleas in the regional press for a nature reserve to save the Bryansk Forest, a vast expanse of conifers and hardwoods near Russia's border with Ukraine. The forest, Igor had discovered, was home to one of Europe's rarest birds--the black stork. The first secretary was planning to come in a few weeks to see what all the fuss was about.

"I couldn't believe my voice had finally been heard," says Igor, now 41. His writings and photographs had proved so compelling that he convinced not only Voystrochenko but a room full of hard-line Communists to protect this area from logging and draining. Eventually Igor found himself in charge of a sizable nature reserve in the Bryansk Forest--a job that brought him into classrooms and conference centers, and into dangerous conflicts with poachers. And it introduced him to foreign conservationists promoting environmental awareness in the region, including one American-- me--who would become his wife.

"It all began when I was 14," recalls Igor. While exploring the woods near his home, he came across a forest meadow erupting in purple pasqueflowers, blue lungworts, yellow anemones and white corydalis. He was so moved to share his discovery with others that he begged his grandmother for a camera. Two weeks later, she gave in and he returned to the meadow. But instead of wildflowers, he saw black earth upturned by tractors and piles of freshly cut logs towering skyward. "I was devastated," Igor recalls. "I made a vow then and there to dedicate my life to saving the Bryansk Forest."

With this new sense of purpose, young Igor trekked through Scotch pine stands and waded through black alder swamps and floodplain oak forests. He tracked roe deer and wild boar, and found wolves and lynx doing the same. He hid near nests of black woodpeckers, kingfishers, northern hazel hens and Eurasian sparrow hawks. Learning to camouflage himself and walk soundlessly, he sneaked up to moose, otters and beavers, shooting rolls of film on his new Russian camera. He came to know all the inhabitants of the forest. Or so he thought.

The summer he turned 15, Igor stumbled across a pair of strange black birds feeding in a remote swamp. Their long legs and bills were bright red. Igor described the unusual birds to local villagers, and "people thought I was seeing things," he remembers. In the town library, he learned the birds were endangered black storks, then unknown to the region. He read that they live only in mature, isolated forests surrounded by swamps, and they winter in equatorial Africa.

So began Igor's lifelong fascination with black storks. He collected everything he could find on the birds. He mapped the region of forest and swamps within walking, boating and hitchhiking distance from his town. During the summers and on school vacations, he combed the forest for black stork nests. Over the next four years, he found nothing resembling the massive roosts he had seen in books, and he began to fear that the birds had disappeared from the Bryansk Forest.

In the summer of 1980, Igor turned to a corner of the woods that remained blank on his map. The Nerussa River, a secluded waterway surrounded by peat bogs and old-growth oak forests, meandered through this area. He bought a rubber boat, sewed a tent, stocked up on film and supplies and hitched a ride to the headwaters of the river. Then he floated slowly downstream, exploring inland woods and swamps on the way.

One evening, as he was looking for a place to camp, he came across a deserted cabin on the riverbank. An unkempt apple orchard stood in front of the house and an abandoned garden stretched out back. As it grew dark, he climbed into the attic and unrolled his sleeping bag.

Igor camped in the attic for the rest of the summer, exploring the surrounding woods and swamps. He lived largely on apples from the orchard and mushrooms and berries collected from the forest. At the end of August, as he was packing his boat to return for his last year at a teaching college, he spotted three black storks flying overhead.

The next year, buoyed by the previous summer's sighting, Igor moved to a small village only six miles from the cabin to teach Russian language and literature and continue his search for the birds. "I began to think that maybe I shouldn't look for the storks," he says. "Maybe it was better if no one knew about them." But he had heard of hunters making soup out of the rare bird, and he saw swamps being drained and huge swaths of forest being cut down. "I wondered if there would be any place left for the coy stork to hide."