Davai clock, davai biodiversity

Delta per kilogram
When I meet a local fisherman, I can't help but ask him how the fishing is going. It's more of a rhetorical question, as we all know that fish have arrived in the Delta rarer than pterodactyls.

Stupid, how can it go? I'm glad when I get a few kilos of mackerel in my net, and that little one, a palm-sized one at that. I haven't seen "currency" for a long time...
Currency, I ask with the sincerity of a city boy who thought he knew it all in the Delta.
"Currency", which means pike, catfish, carp, mackerel... Stuff that should go straight to the inns, because there's a big demand.

Tourism in the Delta is based on fresh fish and other traditional fish dishes. In reality, fish - especially carp - are caught in the prohibition when they enter the flood zones to spawn. So the man of the Delta shoots two rabbits at once - meat and roe. All - by the kilo - bring him a handsome profit when fishing is banned and the inns are stocking up with fish for the coming tourist season. In August, the throngs of tourists for whom the Delta means "borscht" and "pelican chased by boat" eat fresh carp flounder, with carp that has slept its eternal slumber for 3-4 months in the freezer of the enterprising deltaic entrepreneur.

I ask Vanea, a young fisherman, how much is a kilo of carp, who knows the still undisturbed Delta only from pictures and his parents' stories.
8 lei for the cherhana and 9 for the pension. But on this dust, I'd rather give it all to the pension.

We're in Mila 23, the heart of the Delta, where the cherhanas have started to close, at least during the tourist season, when the valuable fish - while there's still some - go to the pensions. All on the black market.

Well, that's good, because that's how much gasoline costs. I say to him, "You've caught 20 kilos of mackerel, your engine will run all day...".
Don't worry, our gas is subsidized... we get it for 5 lei, he smiles.

The Delta is an area declared underprivileged, where the hard life is sweetened by all sorts of subsidies on transport and electricity. Hive is free, fish free, obviously within the quantities set by the legislator. Which are hardly respected. As fishing, as a traditional activity centered on the traditional fishing grounds, is in massive decline, commercial fishermen are becoming boatmen on "privateer" fleets bought with European money in projects aimed at sustainable development of local communities. Powerful and fast boats are entering the Delta with tourists everywhere, sustainably destroying fragile aquatic habitats in shallow-water gullies and secondary channels. The 60+ km/h rush is the delight of day-trippers, who pay a boatman a bribe to enter areas with birds and chase them to take phone pictures of the pelican's gooses as it takes a lumbering flight off the water, guiltily vomiting up a croaker. Collateral casualties are the moorhens and lilies over which the boat speeds and sucks them into the propeller. And it's not just the birds that get caught up in this tourist mix, but also the fish, snails, frogs and all aquatic species in the Danube Delta. This is evidenced by the seagulls that fly over the boat's wake, picking up the pieces of meat chopped up by the propeller, in which the last shred of life has just died. It is in the wake of each of these boats that, every day of the tourist season, a good part of the Delta's biodiversity dies. And speaking of biodiversity, I'm going back to the bar in Mila 23.

Well, what do you do without fish? Because I see that the tourists haven't flocked this year either...
We'll manage. Now it's not fish, it's crayfish. It's 75 lei for a crayfish trap... look, I don't think there's a household in the village that doesn't have a few dozen crayfish traps. There are many who have hundreds of them... It's 12 lei a kilo of crayfish, but I guess we've pretty much driven them out of the area... It's getting harder and harder to find them, but the neighbor has started catching crayfish like no one has ever seen before. He throws them away, nobody wants them, Vanea continues, ordering another beer.

In Lake Fortuna, not far from Mile 23, large freshwater crabs and shrimps, Asian species, have started to appear, probably brought to the Delta by Ukrainian ships unloading water used as ballast and taken from Asian ports to load cargo in the Danube ports. The native crayfish is a territorial and aggressive species, perhaps such invaders the Delta has seen before, but the waters have been "guarded" by our crayfish. Now they have cooled off too, and the "aliens" have already made their way into ecosystems ravaged by fishing, boat traffic, disastrous sewage management, nitrates, insecticides, fungicides and pesticides from local "organic" agriculture.

... But if you want to know - says Vanea, wiping fresh beer foam from his blond mustache with the back of his hand - it's not the crayfish that's the trick now... The leeches, brother! But not just any, the olive ones... you know... the "medicinal" ones. It's 300 lei a kilo of leeches... They're supposed to take them for the anticoagulant.

The pharmaceutical industry uses the anticoagulant that the leeches inoculate when they attach themselves to the host to suck blood. As the Covid pandemic has led to a massive consumption of anticoagulant drugs, which are mandatory in moderate and severe cases, demand is high. An acquaintance told me that a kilogram of leeches sells for 700 lei in Constanța, but this is unconfirmed information. In any case, demand is high and this makes harvesting a kilogram of leeches more profitable than harvesting a kilogram of 'valută', which is sold on the black market, which is almost ubiquitous in the Delta, for 25-30 lei.

So it's still a soup, so to speak....
Canci! The leeches have run out.

Biodiversity is priced in bulk, by the kilogram among the inhabitants of the Delta. From 8 lei for a crayfish to 300 lei for leeches, each element of biodiversity produces plus value, because there is no way it can also produce taxes to the Romanian state, as long as neither crayfish nor leeches are among the species that must be declared to the cherhana. For the rest, poaching does not count. But I don't want to go too deeply into the technical details, because I have a question that has been bothering me for a couple of years now. What happens to the frogs in the Delta? They were everywhere, filling the banks of the Danube, the channels between the canals, the canyons. Billions of frogs.

Vanea, maybe it's just me, but the frogs aren't what they used to be...
You don't think so. They're still about the same as crayfish, about 12 lei, depending on how you haggle... In spring the whole village goes out for frogs, but not anytime, but when the Italians come to buy them. Tons. They've gone cold, but not because of the Italians. I'll tell you how it is...

Here Vanea lights a cigarette, puffs the smoke deep into his chest, nods to a neighbor who has just come ashore with some tourists brought by "corsair" and begins with a rare and urgent word.

Look, I don't have cows, but there are plenty in the village who have 100-200. All with crotals, because they're in the APIA's books. They get subsidies. You know what it's like with our cows... They're in the barn, in the puddle, you don't see them all year round, only when the man from Agriculture comes to count them, to calculate the subsidies he gives you...
I'm wintering in the pond, I understand it's mortality, I say.
Boss, do you have any idea how many calves show up in the spring in the grind? It's serious business getting the ear tags caught in calves' ears. But what you lose in the winter, you gain in the spring.

For the cattle owner, I can't call him a breeder, the business is as profitable as it gets. With no fodder, no cowman, no stable and no vet, costs are limited to the gasoline burned in the boat engine with the APIA man to count the cows with the crotal. With zero milk and cheese reported, with the impossibility of legally slaughtering cows for meat - because there is no authorized abattoir in Tulcea - and with the impossibility of getting live cows out of the Delta due to an infectious epidemic, this kind of zootechnics seems more like a gross farce. The burning of tens of thousands of hectares of reed, as well as the destruction of the fauna and flora in the hays and plains that escape the fire but are trampled under hooves during grazing, is a direct threat to the survival of biodiversity at the mouth of the Danube.

Okay, so what's the deal with the frogs," I ask him, looking at him circumspectly, even though he hadn't even finished his second pint of beer.
Well, it is! That the cattle graze on the haystacks, the plateaus and the barns. She's about the only cow that grazes on reeds, thistles and marsh grass, as she's not a puddler for nothing... But to make room for grazing in the marsh, you have to set fire to the dry reeds in winter, so that in spring the cows can come in and eat the tender reed just barely emerged from the mud. Year after year, thousands of hectares of plains, banks, reeds, willows have burned. Do you understand? Tons of frogs and what's left in that dry reed, he says to me, raising an eyebrow...

Thousands of hectares burn every winter and blacken vast stretches of the delta. Not only the hibernating wildlife - snakes, lizards, frogs, insects, otters, foxes, otter dogs, enot dogs, turtles, bizami, minks - but also the flora is lost in the flames. Apparently it's a traditional gesture to set fire to the old reed so that the new reed can grow vigorously. But this happens on areas where reed is harvested, not everywhere. The fact is that there are more than 25,000 cows in the Delta, all subsidized with EU money. The carrying capacity for grazing is far exceeded, so locals with dozens and hundreds of cows become a kind of Wild West pioneers and scorch the puddle to make room for the cattle. What is harder to understand is why Europeans are paying tens of millions of euros for livestock and agriculture in the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, while paying tens of millions more for projects to protect biodiversity.
I look at Vanea and realize that biodiversity in Brussels is much more expensive than at Mile 23. A project to save the European mink in the Delta is worth tens of thousands of euros, while all the mink furs that end up on the local poaching black market are worth no more than 1% of that. I'm in the Delta and I miss the old Lipovans, the bearded, puddle-loving, God-believing people. And I also miss their old houses, with thatched roofs, white walls and blue woodwork, with their lejancă and icons. I miss the clear waters full of birds, water lilies and fish. I am in the Delta, but all that is far away. A walk through the village will reveal swimming pools, karaoke, thermopane, tin roofs guaranteed for 25 years. The Lejanca is being replaced by a power station, and the bearded Lippovans have disappeared like the lynxes, octopuses, widows and widowers. The waters are murky, churned up by a boat traffic that turns the Old Danube into Magheru Boulevard in summer. The water smells of sewage and the air has a strong whiff of exhaust fumes.
It's the end of the tourist season. The short fall will turn into an atypical winter, most likely without ice and snow. Ideal conditions for poaching pike, because pike roe has also become hard currency - 400 lei per kilogram. But don't be surprised to learn that the Delta is a Biosphere Reserve, part of UNESCO's Man and Biosphere program. With Man and Biosphere in the same bucket, the Delta is like a market in which Man is the merchant and the commodity is the Biosphere. In every corner of the marsh, the reed, the civets and every palm of grindstone already have a price on them, put out on the stall, just as potatoes, radishes, celery and parsley have. Even goose, duck and swan eggs have the price of a delicacy, if you know when to take them out from under the bird's cloaca.
More than 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago, I met a kid from Mila 23 on the Olguța canal, who was fishing for big carp hidden in a hole. The silly was a forbidden net even in communist times, so I asked him jokingly - I say jokingly because back then the Delta was still a paradise - what he would do when he grew up and there were no more carp and catfish to catch. He slammed the silly in the wooden lot and thought for a few seconds, scratching the top of his head.

I'm going to catch a ginger and a flounder," he replied with the satisfaction of a pupil solving a difficult algebra problem on the blackboard.
And when will they go?
Toads, he said, laughing.

We all laughed and we saw our fish, because we were young and we didn't believe then that everything has an end, including Paradise.
In the 1980s, when Ceausescu was planning to turn more than half of the Delta into an agricultural field, a glance into the clear waters was like reading a treatise on ichthyology. Biodiversity, as yet unnamed, was there, before the humble visitor, as in a temple of water lilies. Forty years on, the Delta is a reserve, and the results of the studies currently being carried out to monitor the state of biodiversity are downright embarrassing. Behind buzzwords like biodiversity, protection and sustainable activities lies the indecent reality: not even half of the habitats mapped in the 1990s no longer exist. More than 60% of fish species are threatened or actually extinct. When fish and frogs disappear, snakes and birds disappear. Pelican colonies, the largest in Europe, will collapse. The Delta will be ugly, desolate, with murky waters and fish borscht boiling African catfish and Norwegian mackerel. Perhaps then we won't even notice that the last traditional Lipovene house has been demolished to make way for a one-story hostel with a swimming pool. It will be the transition from deprived area to disaster area.
Vanea has already been staring at his cell phone for minutes. Vanea doesn't have a beard, but he has Facebook and WhatsApp. Then he suddenly remembered me. He tells me, getting up from the table, that he has to go and shake some large Danube winches. Special deep-water creels, set by GPS. Vanea is a modern fisherman, equipped with state-of-the-art technology, 5G on his phone, active in dedicated social networks, where sightings of the controls in the pond are reported, with GPS and on-board computer engine. Vanea maneuvers his boat at over 70 km/h, has a motorcycle helmet and, once in the boat, looks like a cosmonaut who has stepped on the threshold of a church. Because the Delta, in turn, looks like a church with its icons sold and deserted by the faithful.
Vanea, the fisherman, takes off in a hurry, waving goodbye, and disappears along the Old Danube. The sun sinks reddish beyond the horizon. From the sea there is a muffled, distant rumble, reminding me that there is war across the Danube. A Russian cruise missile has hit Snake Island. The 21st century will be fresh fish broth, or it won't be.