Laurent Geslin - Moldova I

My fourth and last mission is taking place in Moldova, a small country between Romania and Ukraine and commonly known as one of the poorest country in Europe. Its president is proud to be the last Communist leader from the Ex-USSR empire.

I arrived at Chisinau, the capital, in the evening and I am welcomed by my translator, Lucian, who will guide me for the next 2 weeks.
My mission should try to get a wide range of the moldovian wildlife from insects, birds and/or mammals… I decided to divide my mission into three different biotopes:  wetlands for birds, old agricultural pasture for insects and woodlands for mammals…

The first difficulty in Moldova is the permit to photograph. All places I went needed an official approval from the local authorities up to the Minister of environment. My first destination was Padurea Domnesca, a reserve in the north west of the country. Padurea Domnesca  is a flooded old oak forest with an impressive heron colony… But because the Reserve is the private hunting ground for the President, I was refused the access and not allowed to photograph anything!
Order directly from the environmental minister at the last minute… I managed to get some pictures of insects at the hilly landscape of the “100 gnomes” (an unusual landscape with hundreds of hills) and even there some soldiers came to  check my ID and ask me what I was doing here…

It took me 2 days to reach Padurea Domnesca and if I wanted to get some water birds my next place was completely in the south and another 2 days drive (the roads are worse than the ones I used in India!!!). So my next destination was the lake Belau, large lake close enough from the Danube Delta to bring some interesting wildlife.

For the lake Belau, I needed to photograph: the mayor’s permission, the warden’s permission from the reserve and the Frontier guard’s permission, another good day wasted in paperwork!!! (Keep calm, please keep calm…). Like most of the protected area in Moldova, the lake Belau is not very much looked after, fishermen work on the protected zone, the level of the lake is getting dangerously low for a lack of irrigation with the river called elegantly “Prutt” and in the middle of the lake stands an oil rig owned by the president’s brother! This platform shouldn’t exist in the reserve but it is extending and roads are built all around for the access! Nevertheless some birds were there, pelicans, waders, herons, egrets and black terns. To get close to the birds enough to photograph them, I did the most dodgy floating hide ever: some plastic bottles, a rope and my camouflage nets over my head. To reach the birds I had to crawl in 10 cm of water and 50 cm of mud. At 4 in the morning, no need to say that it is fairly unpleasant to feel the mud getting inside your pants, mind you, the mud kept me warm while staying up to 6 hours in the water…

Such a shame that the government doesn’t care about the wildlife in the country, it is a potentially very interesting place with rich biodiversity. But Nature uses every little gap to blossom and while the wetlands and forests are scarce,  fields that have been abandoned by farmers gone to work in Russia or Romania are now covered with wild flowers an astonishing diversity of insects…

I am now heading to “Codrii forest” near Chisinau for the last part of my mission, hoping to get some shots of mammals and the permit to photograph them…

Laurent Geslin / Wild Wonders of Europe

Please note that blogs reflect our photographers' opinions and not necessarily those of the directors of Wild Wonders of Europe.