Sparrows and other impressions of St Petersburg
October 2006

A vast and beautiful city of palaces, of water and of gold; great historical museums; a massive river; boat rides; endless streets as straight as an arrow; traffic fast approaching gridlock proportions; bridges; great statues; golden domes, spires and museums; an old fort; 300 years of history; a dour people, the elderly almost always with glum faces; at times bitterly cold; the greatest pie shop in the world (Stolle near the Church on Spilled Blood); undrinkable water polluted with heavy metals and horrible bugs; pollution from the great towers that provide heat to every house in the city; beautiful slim girls who have not yet caught the obesity disease of their western counterparts; great flocks of sparrows; vast numbers of men in uniforms with flat-topped caps.

Had this been a wildlife trip it would have been an unmitigated disaster. My initial research yielded little on wildlife and after my arrival the reason was quite clear. No-one I met had the slightest interest. Period! This I find depressing, but perhaps unsurprising for city dwellers in a place where it can become extremely cold in winter, when temperatures fall to well below minus 30 centigrade and when the daylight hours are a mere five!

My impression is that St Petersburg is reasonably affluent. It is expensive for tourists; less so for locals who pay less. They are, as everywhere else in the world, obsessed with their motor cars. With even more car manufacturing companies about to open factories in the area, it will not be long before total gridlock happens. Urgent action is needed immediately.

So, what of the birdlife? There are hooded crows, great tits, jackdaws, black-headed and common gulls and some black-backed gulls, but none of the northern species I had hoped to see. On the other hand, there were hundreds of house sparrows, just the way it was in London when I was young; great flocks of these essentially endearing birds were everywhere. So, for those who suggest that car pollution is to blame for the demise of sparrows in London, then they should think again. St Petersburg is possibly even more heavily polluted than London. On the river and canals and some of the lakes in the parks were good numbers of mallards, with a few diving ducks and, of course, the inevitable feral pigeons. Two hundred kilometres away in Novgorod we saw green woodpeckers, nuthatches and a fleeting view of an eagle, but it was too far away to id.

So, I took myself off to the zoo, as I had heard that there were Siberian tigers and the zoo is famous for breeding more polar bears than anywhere else in captivity. Unfortunately, the zoo is unspeakably depressing, much the way so many of ours were a few years ago. There is little money to support this place and the general view is that it would be better to redevelop the valuable site on which it is located. If the place cannot be cleaned up and modernised, then that may not be such a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong. I do realise that without captive breeding programmes many species would be extinct, but I was still left pondering if that might not be such a calamity, rather than survive in the squalid conditions here. To see so many stressed and neurotic creatures is not an easy experience to live with: cattle egrets and pelicans in very poor condition, which obviously should have been flying free many hundreds of miles to the south, pathetically small cages housing reindeer, bears and others with so little room for them to exercise. There is a relatively new enclosure for one Siberian tiger, but when one realises just how large its territory would be if it was free it is enough to make one weep… On the other hand, in the wild they are still being hunted to extinction!

There is little that is pure and wholesome here; dirt is everywhere; polar bear excrement so plainly in evidence and a huge tick festoons the eye of a lioness. In many ways I now wish that I had not visited the place, but then I would have missed seeing the tigers, the polar bears and the many truly glorious eagles.

My fondest memories of St Petersburg will be the sparrows and the many great palaces. Then there were the amazing pies, both savoury and sweet, at Stolle. I have drunk water straight from mountain-tops on Fijian islands and possibly the finest water of all in Wester Ross, in Scotland, but here the water is too polluted, even after having been boiled for ten minutes!

Would I go again? Oh yes, if only to visit the many sites I missed on this trip.