He had to cover 300 kilometers to take a photo of an elk. He took 3,000 (!) shots to capture a squirrel standing on its hind legs. He wandered across the Volynian bogs to the point of exhaustion to capture the rare Natterjack toad. As he was waiting for wisents [European bison – Ed.] in a remote forest, his companion forgot him there, and he almost ended up spending a winter night in the woods. The Volynian reporter of the newspaper Uriadovy kurier Valerii MELNYK has many similar stories about “hunting” for photos in the wild. They are all the more interesting given that Ukraine is rich in unique flora and fauna, but there are few people here who are able to capture this original world.
Why did he become a hunter? Why did he later change his gun for a photo camera? Why did he start writing books on environmental protection, shooting films about wild nature? How does he know so much about the animals, birds, forest and lakes in Volyn? These are the questions we asked Valerii, who marked his 55th anniversary on February 10. The author has had the pleasure of not only studying together with Melnyk at the Journalism Department at Lviv University, but also working in the oblast youth newspaper Molody leninets together. Today’s periodicals can only dream of the popularity it used to enjoy. At Melnkyk’s initiative, jointly with readers we planted forests, where people now gather mushrooms and hunt hares. His public speeches urged Volyn residents to gather as much as 107,000 signatures against a thoughtless increase of capacity by the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant (and they managed at the time). And 5,000 letters would come from Volyn and neighboring oblasts to each single round of “Nature” lotto, which was Melnyk’s brainchild.
When I look at your shots of wild nature, I can’t believe that in your time you were an ardent hunter. Why did you take up photography instead? Was it because it pitied you to kill the beasts?
“When I was a boy I knew that I would be a hunter. Sometimes I missed my school classes in order to go to the oblast library, where I soon read all the books about hunting they had. There have never been any hunters in our family, at least in the generations I know. But I have this on some genetic level, because the ancient people took only courageous and strong men to hunt, as they could kill a mammoth for the tribe, and did not cower when they saw predators. The yellow-bellied stayed with women to dig roots and keep the fire, so that the tribe could eat the bag. I think we have such a mannered society, and so many skeptics today because of those non-hunters. They know nothing of hunting, which they say we don’t need. Yet they eagerly eat steaks at restaurants and never refuse from chicken. And I think domestic hens want to live like wild ducks. The only difference between skeptics who says that hunting is bad and me, a hunter, is that I kill the beast myself and they were served it on a tray.
“I’m not saying that I frequently wander across the woods with a gun, much more often I carry a photo camera with me. At times, when hunting season starts (this is a sacred thing!)
I manage to go once or twice to the forest. I shoot one or two ducks in order to prove to myself that I haven’t degraded as a hunter and get some satisfaction as a hunter that I still shoot well. And I make lots of shots, because 99.5 percent of people will never see what I see through lens.”
You saw a black stork, which is called a black hermit for its unsociability. Once, as I was on a working visit to a remote village of Ratne raion, I saw it from a several-meter distance, but before we even stopped the car, the bird flew away. How did you manage to capture a black stork, and the great gray owl? Their photos are included in your new photo album, which has all the grounds to become a real Volynian token.
“The great gray owl is a bird which has not been depicted in the previous editions of the Red Book of Ukraine, because it was considered that it has become extinct in our country. Only the last edition of the Red Book mentions this bird. Now there are 20 to 30 couples of the Lapland owl in Ukraine. People rarely make such photos accidentally, you should work on this. You have to wear high rubber boots, overalls, not be afraid that you will be bitten by bog gnats, or spend a night in the forest and so on. You should always carry a camera with you, fill up the car, with a mere assumption that you will see a rare beast in one or another part of Voly-nian woods. But you are never sure that you will make the desired shot. And the peculiarity of great gray owl is that it is not at all afraid of people.”
And this resulted in disaster: man, nature’s “master,” has nearly destroyed the population.
“Unfortunately, the situation is that any rich man, who has just bought a gun with a gilded detent, considers himself a hunter. But to get the notion of what a true hunter is, you should first read the novelette by Arsenyev, Dersu Uzala. One who reads it understands that you should not take too much from nature, you can’t shoot at swifts, swallows, or gulls just for pleasure. Or the same great gray owl. You should come to understanding that hunting means to think, as this is the most intimate and most dangerous form of communication with wild nature. But it is impossible and wrong to ban hunting completely, because hunting has the following paradox: the density of game population is higher in places with intensive hunting. The opponents of hunting see it as simple shooting, whereas professionals — as feeding and breeding the species that have become nearly extinct. A total of 100,000 deer are shot each year in Sweden. And 21,000 European deer, 13,000 fallow deer, 9,000 mouflon, 127,000 roes, 138,000 wild boars, 104,000 hares, 590,000 pheasants are shot in the Czech Republic. And Czechs shoot 5,000 so-called trophy deer a year, with big and beautiful horns used as actually hunter trophies (there are criteria). There was an incident in Ukraine, when Rivne foresters bought a foreign car for business needs for the money they got for trophy horns. There was an investigation because nobody believed that it is possible to buy such a car for ‘some’ horns.
“And I tried to capture a black stork for three years — this bird is very wary. For you to understand how beasts learn of a man’s presence, I will give you the following example. A fox hears a mouse’s squeak from a 500-meter distance, and it hears where exactly the mouse is located.”
One of my fellow journalists told me how she went on working trip with you. You were passing a village in a forest. Suddenly you stopped the car abruptly, and ran with a camera to some yard. And some man encountered you with a pitchfork in his hands.
“He did not scare me, we came to terms, but he scared the squirrel I had noticed with my peripheral vision. This creature is not rare, but it is extremely active, so it is hard to capture it. The editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Lisovy myslyvsky zhurnal Valentyna Maksymenko says that not more than five or six people in the entire state make professional photos of woodlands, wild nature. I am acquainted with only two of them. Why aren’t people eager to take up hunting with a camera? The answer is really simple. All of your photos accumulate in the archives, you cannot find where to place even the most unique shot. You can buy the same good camera and cover weddings: work from midday to midnight, make 30 shots and get your 200 dollars. I have covered a total of 400 kilometers before I found the place where cranes gather in August to go to the hot countries. I came there, parked my car, and went to the place in squatting position via a soil-reclamation canal. I looked up, in one and another direction. But the cranes already disappeared. A herd of cattle was grazing there. So, I covered 400 kilometers for nothing. If you don’t live with nature, don’t know it and lack patience, you won’t be able to shoot the forest and its inhabitants.”
Please tell some stories from your photo trips. I suppose there have been many incidents like the one with the man and pitchfork.
“With pitchfork or without, I have been in some stressful situations. Once I was going to make photos of wisents. I was brought to the part of the forest where they could come for food. The hunter, glad that he had brought me to the place, drank some alcohol and forgot that he was supposed to take me back from the forest. The frost was strong, and I was deep in the woods. Of course I had the right equipment with me, because I have professional clothes and shoes. There was a haystack nearby, wherein I could spend the night, though in the evening the frost reached 13 degrees below. But I had to warn my wife that I was spending the night in the forest. And there was no mobile phone coverage on the glade where I was staying. It got dark. I paced back and forth until my old Nokia showed one point. Step right, step left — the signal disappeared again. But I ma-naged to talk with a knowledgeable man who told me how to find a way out of the forest.”
Did you capture the wisents?
“Yes, I did.”
What creatures haven’t you crossed off your list yet?
“I have never made a shot of a wolf, and probably I never will, as I don’t know how to do this in wild nature. I could make a photo of a wolf in an enclosure. But this is not serious. All living creatures — be it a spider of a wisent — are interesting in their own way.”
I was really charmed by the Natterjack toad, which at first seemed ugly, mildly speaking, but when I looked more attentively at its pose… This is natural perfection and beauty!
“I haven’t made my best shot yet, though in the last four years I have made some 220,000 shots (the photo camera counted this). As a rule, 98-99 percent of the photos are a waste. It was interesting for me to capture the birth of a wild gosling. I am not sure whether anyone has ever made such a photo session. Wild geese are a great joy nowadays. It is gratifying that I have managed to capture a black cormorant on Svitiaz Lake. Some processes force these birds to leave Ukraine’s south and move to our Polissia. This is a very wary bird, I suppose it’s because cormorants are ‘trained’ by guns in the south. This one was very young, that is why it let me come so close.”
