by Binxi Li
Kytalyk, July 17, 2013
Hi everyone :-)! This is Bingxi Li from Wageningen University, the Netherlands this time. Today I volunteered to write a new blog and this time I will try to show you the beauty of eastern Siberian tundra through my eyes.
This is my third summer season in Kytalyk nature reserve, northeastern Siberia. The views and landscapes around our base have become so familiar to me. From the ground, the view is usually far from fascinating, compared with the satellite image of this area. It is a vast flat area with only short growing vegetation, while the only high points in our sight are a few pingos, one of which around 4 kilometers away is the background of most our pictures. In spite of this “boring” landscape, I am still largely obsessed by Siberia. The unpredictable arctic weather not only makes troubles to our daily life and research activities, but also switches the colors of the land, especially at midnight. The midnight sunshine here is gorgeous in summer. The low sun angle creates extremely long shadows so that the contrast ratio is high. The red or orange sunshine softly covers everything of this land and coloring everything. When the clouds partly cover the sun, countless rays of light penetrate through the gaps, shining out with great brilliancy. The various cloud shapes in the crystal blue sky add extra beauty to this landscape. Everybody in Kytalyk is so addicted to the midnight view. According to my unreliable guess, people need significantly more time to go to the toilet at night than during the day, simply because we always waste some additional minutes on appreciating the beautiful view. Thus, going to the toilet with camera is a new fashion in Kytalyk. Personally, I cannot remember how many gigabytes I spent in storing the picture of the night sunshine with the background of the pingo, but still I could not stop myself taking pictures from almost the same angle now and then. It is simply so … beautiful!
Midnight photo session in Ktalyk (Photo: B. Li, July 2013).
Inge in the twilight (Photo: B. Li, July 2013).
The wild life here is also amazing. The summer is the liveliest time in Siberia. Many birds fly thousands of miles from China, Southeast Asia and even Australia to the very north, their summer destination. Creating and feeding new generations is the reason of the great migrations. Several couples of tundra swans have their nest near our base, they probably just come from Huanghe delta near the Yellow Sea and the blue throat thrush, a beautiful large robin-like species with marvelous songs, always flies around our kitchen, might just have finished their warm winter holiday in Hongkong one month ago. Rough legged buzzard couples are from Mongolia or Southern Far East Russia. Sandhill cranes, the relatives of the Kytalyk star species Siberian white crane, come from the US and Canada. Sometimes, I have the illusion that I am just one of millions of them, only for a different purpose. When I see these birds, I often imagine that maybe we have seen each other long before in my lovely hometown far in the south and accidentally meet each other again here, like two old friends.
Life is amazing, isn’t it? (Photo: B. Li, July 2013).