Oct 14, 2009, 12:59 GMT
Askania Nova, Ukraine - Wild horses and bison still run free in Europe's last surviving primordial steppe, but Ukraine's cash-strapped government is increasingly hard put to protect Askania Nova's fragile grasslands.
Set in the table-flat prairie of Ukraine's southern Kherson province, the Askania Nova nature preserve offers a visitor sights lost to the rest of the European continent for centuries. On a treeless plain under a blue sky and a relentless wind, herds of fallow deer and saiga antelope keep a nervous distance, blending in with an amber horizon.
Water is scarce, and in the lowest hollows - Askania Nova's 825 square kilometres are a bit below sea level - animal activity is intense. Plovers, stilts, geese, and swans at a water hole break cover en masse as strangers approach. The flapping wings of a ruddy shelduck flock, numbering in the hundreds, drown out the sound of their quacks.
A pair of white-tailed eagles delay takeoff longer, waiting until a small group of park visitors approaches within 30 metres, before rising in the air.
A short stroll through Askania's browning early October grass suggests the biosphere functions much as it did before man's arrival: whitening deer bones, rabbit warrens, a disemboweled mouse carcass, a wide selection of ungulate manures, and even the cast-off skin of a steppe viper.
'Our entire effort at this park is focused on maintaining what we have, and not losing it forever,' Viktor Harvilenko, director of the Askania Nova nature preserve, told the German Press Agency dpa. 'This place is unique, and it must be preserved for future generations.'
Regional historians believe Askania Nova's land - in the heart of Ukraine's heavily cultivated black earth belt - has never been plowed.
An imperial whim of Russian Empress Catherine the Great is reputedly the reason: Once the tsarina's armies conquered the region from non-agricultural nomads in the late 1700s, Catherine gave the Askania district to a loyal noble, who turned it into a massive sheep station.
The noble's successors, the Faltz-Fein family, had converted much of Askania into a nature preserve by the late 19th century, a process completed by the Soviets.
Harvilenko, one of the former Soviet Union's leading natural biologists, is the latest inheritor of Faltz-Fein mantle. Taking over the Askania park in 1991, he balances the competing demands of keeping the ecology relatively pristine and attracting tourists and government financing to pay the bills.
'Research is a critical part of what we do here; the size and type of environment of Askania provides unique opportunities,' Harilenko said. 'But at the same time we need the visitors. We can't just wall ourselves off from the rest of the world.'
Herds of Przewalski's horses are the park's undisputed stars. They are Harilenko's best argument that the nature preserve of a poor former Soviet republic can contribute to world science, and even save a species.
A stocky animal, Przewalski's horse was nearing extinction in the 1980s due to hunting and its restricted movement. The few that existed in zoos bred poorly. For survival the species needed fresh blood, and a safe home on the open range.
Today Askania's herd is the world's largest, and Przewalski horses bred in Ukraine have returned to their native Mongolia.
During an early autumn visit, dozens of muscular bay and chestnut Przerwalski dams, or mothers, eyed human visitors, some grazing as others stayed firmly between the people and the foals. Nearby a stallion neighed challenges and charged a fence, furious that strangers had approached his females.
Only one-third of Askania's primordial steppe territory is fenced, with only a band of earth, and sometimes a road, separating another 500 hectares of protected grassland, from wheat fields or villages on the other side. Rangers patrol the perimeter, and local villagers, though poor, generally stay out of the protected grassland.
Increasing numbers of tourists visit the park, which includes a conventional zoo and an English garden put in by the Falz-Feins, with some 150,000 in 2009. A lucky few - some 1,600 a tourist season - are allowed into the steppe with guides, to approach horses up close, as well as neighbouring bison, deer and antelope herds, and smaller groups of auroch, eland, wildebeast, and even ostrich and zebra.
'Government financing is very short, we by law must limit the number of visitors to the steppe ... (and) I need 74 kilometres of fence just to protect our territory, and the money isn't there,' Harilenko said.
'So all we can do is carry on with what we have,' he said. 'And give the best home we can to the animals.'
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