Introduction
In this book, we present an overview of the available information on the scale and character of seabird communities in the Russian Far East. Ranging along the vast eastern end of the Asian continent from the edge of Yakutia in the northwest to the boundary with Korea and China in the southeast, these communities represent one of the world's greatest and least known (in the west, at least) seabird resources. Forty species of alcids, procellariids, gulls, terns, and cormorants breed in the Russian Far East and are the central subjects of this book. Many of these breeding species are shared with North America, but others, such as Swinhoe's Storm-Petrel, Japanese (Temminck's) Cormorant, Japanese Murrelet, and Ross' Gull, are effectively local endemics, breeding only in the Russian Far East and the adjacent parts of Asia. These endemics are among the least known seabirds in the world. In addition, we have included nonbreeding and postbreeding birds that use the area as seasonal habitat. Large numbers of these birds arrive from the Arctic interior of Asia and the South Pacific.
The coast of the Russian Far East is more than 4000 km long and is washed by two oceans and five seas. In the north, the Russian Far East includes the East Siberian and Chukchi seas of the Arctic Ocean, whereas the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, and Sea of Japan lie south of Bering Strait on the western edge of the North Pacific. It is an extremely complex coast, divided by large peninsulas such as Chukotka and Kamchatka, big islands such as Sakhalin and Hokkaido, and chains of small volcanic islands such as the Kurils and Aleutians. It includes some of the richest and most productive seas in the world. The Russian Far East offers a geographic, ecological, and cultural link between intensive seabird research in Japan and equally intensive efforts in Canada and the United States. The goal of these chapters is to present a broad overview of very large subregions, and we have therefore not discussed the finer biogeographic and natural divisions of the Russian Far East in detail. Similarly, we have confined ourselves to the eastern coast of Asia and have not included the heroic explorations to study the Arctic biota that have generated a great mass of information.
For many readers, the details of the geography will be unfamiliar, and few atlases cover the area in detail (but see Anon. 1998). We provide maps of the regions of interest in Appendix 1 and a list of the Russian place names and locations mentioned in the text in Appendix 2. We have avoided the use of Russian acronyms, but readers of this book will undoubtedly come across them in other literature. Appendix 3 contains a short list of acronyms and names of the more important Russian agencies and institutes in the Far East.
Only a handful of scientists have studied the seabirds of the Russian Far East in the past few decades, but most appear as authors of one chapter or another of this book. Their participation has created an opportunity for an overview of the most current information on the region's seabirds, putting distribution and abundance in the context of oceanic and climatic conditions and identifying management and conservation problems at the end of the 20th century. Unlike the American North Pacific, the ecosystems of the Russian coast are constrained by pack ice for much of the year, the seabird phenologies are driven by snow cover and permafrost, and huge tracts are intensively exploited and modified for human use in the form of subsistence hunting, reindeer grazing, commercial fishing, or fur farming. In the 21st century, we can expect a great increase in petrochemical development and seafloor mining.
The book is divided into six chapters. The first sets the historical context, touching on the activities of the early explorers, the museum collectors, and the descriptive naturalists, as well as the relatively recent development of large scientific institutes devoted to natural resources. The second chapter sets the marine context, with a description of the oceanography and climate of the region. Chapter 3 focuses on the status, abundance, and distribution of the 40 breeding species; wherever possible, we have also included pertinent information on habitat requirements, breeding phenology, and success. Chapter 4 discusses birds at sea, dealing with the annual migrations from the southern hemisphere and the Asian interior. Chapter 5 deals with fishery interactions and the scale of by-catch of seabirds, particularly near their breeding colonies. Chapter 6 outlines the habitat preservation and wildlife management programs that affect seabird conservation in the Russian Far East.
We hope that this book will be useful to both Russian and foreign scientists who have only a most general concept of the seabird resource in the Russian Far East. We stress the problems of the near future, proposing both regional and international cooperative protection efforts. Such efforts require integration of Russian information and approaches with those of our Pacific neighbours. Elsewhere in the North Pacific, the past few decades have been marked by a general increase in seabird research effort and report production. Important gaps have been filled, and conservation planning is well advanced. Generally, however, the seabirds of the Russian Far East are poorly represented in discussions of the North Pacific. Just as the Russian Far East is isolated from the rest of the North Pacific by distance and geographic barriers, linguistic barriers isolate it intellectually. Much useful material is unknown to western scientists simply because it exists only in Russian or in poorly circulated translations. Although the Russian Far East is still plagued by information gaps and fragmentary knowledge, there is much more information available than has appeared in other English-language material.
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