Pleistocene Park Patreon report March 2020

Dear Friends

This is our first monthly report for the Patreon subscribers so will provide some of the back ups.

Park is located above the Arctic circle in the Kolyma river lowland in the North-Eastern Siberia. We own 144km2 of land, of which we so far managed to fence 20km2. Within this territory we have some smaller enclosures where we keep animals at high density and allowing them to transform the landscape. At the moment we have around 150 animals which are reindeer, moose, yakutian horses, wisent, yaks, kalmykian cows, cold adapted sheep and most recent american steppe bison. Also there are some local dwellers like hares, foxes, polar foxes, sables, wolverines and bears. 

Our job is to introduce animals, help them to adapt, and support them during the winter, since they are just creating the high productive pastures where they can live in the future. 

We have 2-3 people working in the Park on the regular basis and their job is to keep an eye on the animals, support the infrastructure and maintain the research equipment. In case of some construction works (like fence building) we contract more people. 

This winter was not bad in terms of snow, and animals can dig through it looking for forage, but the winter been quiet cold (just two weeks ago it dropped to -50C). Fortunately all animals dealed with this well (either with natural ability to resist cold, like reindeer, horses, wisent !and! bison) or with help of shelters (cows and sheep).

Now the spring is finally coming (Arctic spring) and temperatures are around -25C, with lots of sunny days. After darkness at -40 for months, it does feel pleasant. 

Spring is the time animals give birth to kids. Usually it happens later, but first this year are sheep. They been introduced to the Park two and a half years ago. Originally I wanted to get some goats, but the type of goats I wanted I couldn't get for some veterinary beaurocratic reasons, and I settled with sheep. Wanted to introduce some weed eaters to the system. Sheep appeared cheap and easy option (I think total expenses were 15,000usd for purchase and transportation from lake Baikal). They tolerate cold environment quiet well and they are good browsers, but two things kept me doubting their successfull existence in the park. First is predation. They are do not have good defending strategies, and we had some losses because of bears and wolverines. So we keep them in the closest fenced areas, where predators are rare. And secondly sheep didn't do too well with reproductions. Pregnancies were sporadic and mostly mothers didn't accept lambs, or they been born undevelopped. I suspect this has to do with change in climate and forage. But probably adaptation passed well, and over short week period were born 9 healthy lambs. Both mothers and lambs feel fine. I am not certain we will be able to get sheep adapt enough to live in the wild ecosystem, but at the moment they are doing their part of job in eating weeds so having their numbers recovering is good. Below is one of the mothers with the baby. 

As for the plans for the March we will have one filming crew coming, and we will make a 800km trip over the winter road to buy 10 new horses for the park. It been several years since we last bought horses, and want to refresh the blood. The funds for that will come from the March input from Patreon, money raised by Pleistocene Park foundation, and money from the filming crew which will film the process of animals transportation. 

In the end want to thank you all for support, we will keep you informed on our development. 

We still owe Pioneer and Voyager of the steppes to you guys. We are working on that! 

Don't forget to invite more people to our campaign!

All the best

Nikita Zimov