Biography is my world

One of the streets is not far from our house in Simferopol. This part of the city was then called Ak-Mosque. Butterflies are the dreams of my childhood: a dead head and an oleandra brap. Both today are in the Red Book. Guywian butterfly Morf Menelaus. Why is it such a shining blue coloring - so far a secret. But I established the purpose of many beach humps and outgrowths: the cavities between the “incomprehensible” outgrowths on the body of insects turned out to be wave “lighthouses”.

In the figure - the Australian beetle of Bolbocerus. In the nursery, my attention was somehow attracted by barrels that were prepared solidly with someone from a sheet of birch: short, cylindrical, but very dense. The most remarkable is his head, its upper connection with a long neck with a breast. This similarity has even more confirmed its further actions.

I already knew that bees and wasps even return home from distant distances and that a good visual memory leads to their house. Outside the northern border of the nursery, on the meadow between Kolki, Icelulu took a turf for roofs. The beginning of x. Finally, the bumblebee reserve was finally created and officially recognized - the so -called meadow. Isilkulsky still life.

At that happy time, sketches and paintings turned out to be juicy and joyful. And this is an amazing tiny wingspan of 9 millimeters, the creation is also a butterfly, but from the Feuroklok family. Back in the beginning of the 10ths, I could observe many insects for half an hour near Isilkul, including these bugs: bronzovka, putpan, a variegated, a golden grunt, a slogkun, tinnik, and weevil.

Now many of them have disappeared in those places. His first material appeared on the pages of our magazine almost thirty years ago, in the year. He is infinitely devoted to the case, chosen once and for all in early youth. A huge flying, crawling, buzzing and striking kingdom of insects is his world, which he has observed and has been studying for many, many years.

But Viktor Stepanovich not only contemplates, satisfying his curiosity, a person of action, he seeks to save and preserve this wealth of wildlife for future generations. And it is necessary to save. The plowed lands, flooded territories, excess chemicalization erase many types of insects from the face of the Earth. Do we often see lightly graceful dragonflies today, we hear the chattering of grasshoppers, rejoice at multi-colored beauty-butterfly?

And a passionate entomologist, selflessly devoted to nature, embodies his ideas into life, no matter how difficult it is: for example, he was the first to understand that we need to save insect-pollinators, otherwise a person will be left without crops, and began to create reserves for them. Recently, in Novosibirsk, in the Publishing and Publishing House "Soviet Siberia" his book, which is called - "My World" has been published.

The book is accompanied by the magnificent, thinnest sketches of different insects: Viktor Stepanovich - a talented artist - always illustrates his work himself. On its pages, the reader will find a lot of interesting information about the nature of insects, will be able to consider the smallest details of the structure of a butterfly, bumblebee, ants, wasps, various beetles.

And how many useful and interesting tips on how to learn how to observe the world of insects will find there lovers of nature! The book, unfortunately, was published in a small circulation - copies were written in the form of a story about life and many years of work. Like many people of his generations, Grebennikov had to endure many difficult years: hungry e, difficult war years, but the worst fell to his lot in the post -war year.

Twenty -year -old, he was sentenced to 20 years of camps, and only Stalin's death saved him. We present to readers of the magazine excerpts from V. Grebennikov’s book “My World”, illustrated by his own drawings. Siberian I am from the beginning of the war, from the forty -first. Both my youth, and the mature years have passed in a small, sweet to my heart, a town called Isilkul, lost on the forest-steppe plains of the south-west of the Omsk region, near the Kazakhstan steppes.

There, in the vicinity of Isilkul, blown by the blue winter winds, baked by the drying July sun and still violently greening every impassable -earth's loud spring - there is a part of my soul and heart, although I have been living in Novosibirsk for a long time, and why - you will understand from the book. But this was preceded by completely different worlds and countries: a fabulous childhood, with his some special, vivid, enthusiastic perception of everything that surrounded me, and also Crimea.

I was born and raised in the fairy -tale city of Simferopol it is now he was equal to our other cities - just as Luden, and Seru, and Dummaria, and, or rather, in the Naples of Scythian, the rocky foot of which is still rustling a stream that flows into Salgir, which was also noisy twenty -two centuries ago with a powerful and formidable tsar Skilur. As a childhood talisman, which connects me with those times and places, I keep a handful of skulls, once selected at the excavations of the acropolis - the city center - the Scythian glorious capital.And I also keep two talismans -peers: one from the top of my beloved Mount Chatyrdag, the other is chopped off from the step of the front porch of our house, where I was born, and he, who has seen the views of the veteran to this day, although he transferred several wars and earthquakes, and much more.

My mother’s grandfather, the nobleman Viktor Viktorovich Tersky, was bought by his daughter an ordinary mansion before his final ruin. I didn't find my grandfather. I remember only a few photo albums with numerous "portraits" of his horses and hunting dogs; completely sewn with bead roses belts from its guns; I owe the non -habitable and game mountains of books to them by most of my knowledge - fortunately, there were bromine, and Fabr, and Flammarion there; Portrait of the grandmother - Moscow Chamber singer; ancient carved furniture; Heavy golden spoons, chains, watches, “dozens”, which my parents are impractical somehow quickly and, probably, stupidly exchanged Torgsin in the hunger thirties for flour, pork smell and some kind of widespread that did not interest me completely.

As soon as I got to my feet, nature began to open my treasures, in front of which both the golden spoons and diamonds seemed to me huge. Although the word "seemed" - not entirely true: I began a conscious acquaintance with the world in early childhood, when there was three times less than an adult; Accordingly, everything that surrounded me was really three times greater than now - the house, the court, and the yard, and the street, and the whole city and my miracle -dog was my first country of insects - now I would call it - if he had survived!

Moreover, I remember well: for the collections, I did not catch anyone here, believing that living insects in the courtyard are much more valuable than they, caught here, but killed in a stain - a jar of poison, dried on pins and placed in the collection. No one inspired me, no one taught this; On the contrary, every week on a wooden churbak at the sheds they chopped neck chickens, more than once with me they drowned an excess of cat's offspring in a bucket of water, no love for the living, probably inherent in each of us in early childhood, accidentally heated by the proximity and brightness of the insect world, did not fade in me, and on the contrary, it was growing and reinforced at any time.

The headings “face to face with nature” a detailed description of the illustration in the nursery, my attention was somehow attracted by the barrels that were good for someone from a sheet of birch: short, cylindrical, but very dense. At the base of the sheet there was only a small green flag and then one day I was lucky to see the unknown builder. It was a bugword beetle, in Latin an apoderus, pacing a birch on a sheet of birch on long shiny black legs, with a body highly raised above the leaves.

The most remarkable is his head, its upper connection with a long neck with a breast: at the front end of this cervical "tube" a real ball joint is arranged, which allows the pipe -wrap to turn the head in any direction much more cool and free. That's why his movements seemed meaningful. Stopping at one place of the left edge of the sheet, the bugs carefully examined it with antennae; Then he went to the base of the sheet, touched the vests with the antennae, returned again to the place, again - to the vein.

He clearly measured something according to the well-known principle "measure seven times, cut off once." Having finally set the work point, the bugs gnawed at the sheet and began to cut it with stars, like short scissors on the iron. Soon, a thick central vein met in his way. Without special works, having cut it off and it, the cutter of the cutting line of the cut further, to the other half of the sheet, but here, behind the vein, its “cut” went down rather cool down.

Bringing the incision to the middle of the right field of the sheet, the bug stopped, checked the work with antennae, cut a little more, thoroughly wiped his legs, antennae, neck and then the incredible began. The builder went to the very top of the sheet and, acting with his long and tenacious legs and his head, began to fold the sheet along the vein with force, simultaneously rolling it across - to the base where the vein was chopped.

The work was given with great difficulty: the sheet was elastic, thick, all the more composed by half, and it was necessary to overcome the resistance of the sheet itself, and especially the rather thick side veins, departing from the central one. The elastic sheet sought to straighten up, but the strong and tenacious paws of the beetle not only reliably fixed the made, but continued to fold, tighten and turn unnecessary material with even greater labor and strength: at first, the coolers had already turned into a cylinder, but it was necessary to work with increasing difficulties: the compressed and dumped sheet became wider and more than the tenant and sometimes a tire It seemed that the beetle for this complex and difficult work clearly lacks his legs - so many actions had been for each two days after I was here again.

The beetle - no, but the cylinder is completely ready. Others find each other by smell, others are unknown how.In the remarkable experiments of Jean-Henri, Fabra's males-boobs-saturations flew to the female not only from the leeward, but also from the windward side, where even the molecule of the grocery substance of the female could not get. Kamenniki bees brought by him for many hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, returned home even after the Fabr “circled” in the dark box, which he rotated on the rope, before returning.

We regularly returned home from two or three kilometers, moreover, it is straightforward through the city, the wasps of the ceremonies. Therefore, the "feeling of home" exists really and widespread in nature. Behind the northern border of the nursery, on the meadow between the Kolki, the Isylkuls took the turf for the roofs: they cut down the spatula on the L-shaped cuttings as if flat-convex round “lenses” and took them to the city where they laid them on the roofs of sheds, dugouts, houses like tiles-heavy and warm roofs from rains and frosts.

There were sites with holes located like a honeycomb close to each other in the clearings.

So, one such "lunar platform" was chosen by the wasp-gaps. Then, in the forty-second, I was surprised: the brown-black slender wasp was dragging a mare for a medium-sized mustache, apparently immobilized by the blows of the sting; Following her, I soon saw that she was not alone: ​​almost a parallel course, another spell dragged exactly the same mare.

And when the third hunter with the burden came across, I did this: I went around their large, meters over thirty, an arc and headed towards them. Here I came across that "lunar site", where several OS worked. Some dug minks, others ran fussing, others dragged immobilized mares into their dungeons. The minks were not located so densely, no closer to one from the other, but all, when I carefully saw the "osograd", there were hundreds of three, no less.

I carefully opened a few minks then. They were shallow; The passing hollow down the move ended with an oblong volume cave, in which there were motionless films of the same species - two, sometimes three copies. They lay down their feet, sometimes with a "jack"; As soon as the ends of the paws and probes shuddered slightly - such small antennae at the very mouth. On the chest of one of the filly there was either a tightly glued egg, or a navigation larva that had already emerged from it, I could not see the hunt of these fraud in the poor fellow.

According to the Fabra, the species of the types that he observed in France was immobilized the crickets and grasshoppers with three strokes of the sting into nerve nodes - cervical, chest and at the base of the abdomen; I think that my Isilkulsky acted in a similar way. Having cut out the earthen cube -“monolith” with a mink of a spell, already filled with filly and carefully buried owl, for detailed home observations - I inadvertently “grabbed” the next mink, in my opinion, abandoned: in any case, for several hours no one appeared here with or without prey.

Carefully transferred the monolith to the edge of the ditch, about twenty meters, and maybe more - here were my camping belongings, including a box for transferring a monolith. And suddenly the unexpected happened. From the east side, a spell flew out, rushed to my earthen Cuba, anxiously squeaking his wings, ran along it; I immediately found empty! Then, apparently, making sure that his mink “moved” to another place, and in addition, was damaged, flew away and no longer appeared: undoubtedly, to make a new cave within the native “Sprace of the town”.

How did the wasp found out that her mink is now exactly here? Surely not by smell: firstly, this is far away, and secondly, it cannot be such that every copy of the fraud of methyl mink with his “personal” odorous substance.