Today in Russia there is a country-wide activity going on: "Blogger against littering" (it was initiated by one of the popular bloggers in Russia, Sergay Dolya). At our ranger station the attendence was perfect! We were among the first in Russia who started this litter-cleaning event at 10 am local time, when it was still 2 am in Moscow. There were four of us: my sons, seven years old Makar and ten years old Andrey, my wife Laura and I. For today, we decided to clean two kilometers of reserve Pacific Ocean shoreline from man-made-debris and, by 3 pm we completed our task! The garbage, brought by the ocean, include parts of fishing nets and ropes, plastic bottles and other man-made objects. The ropes and fishing nets impose immediate danger to the wildlife here (do you remember what happened to Mr. Sneaky Evildoer two weeks ago..?).
Of course it is very important to keep our cities and villages clean. But also, it is important to remember that our trash is capable of killing wild animals if irresponsibly left in the nature. The bottle of soft drinks or alcohol thrown in the bushes will attract small animals that can often get trapped inside the bottle and die.
The cans can become a deadly muzzle for larger animals, such as foxes. The leftover food given to a bear will almost inevitably lead to it's future shooting. That is because the bear, that once tries human food will afterwards always try to get it more of it by any means. Every year in Kamchatka rangers have to shoot many such bears addicted to human "trash". This year is no exception, there were at least 10 bears shot for this reason in different parts of Kamchatka up till now, including one family of mother and two year old cubs that were fed by people on the road. They were fed by many visitors from their cars, and people even filmed them, before they were shot (you can watch a video of them, for example here).
unexpectedly we gained two additional participants to our activity: grown up male foxes joined us. Their actions, however were quite the opposite to ours, instead of collecting the trash, they were trying to steal it from our bags. One of the animals even started playing games with boys, that interrupted their productive work for a whole hour.
Originally posted
