The Danube (7 page)

Where the birds feed depends on the water levels in the delta. In the late spring, when rain and melting snow upstream swell the river to a swirling brown flood, pelicans and waders have to go further afield to fish. Neither of the two pelican species in the Danube can dive, so they need shallow water to feed in. Human interference in the landscape – such as the building of wind farms – forces the pelicans to make wider and wider detours. And the longer they spend away from their nests, the less chance their chicks will survive. Daniel's story reminds me of a fisherman I met many years ago in the Lofoten Islands off Norway. As a young, newly married man, he was rarely away on his boat for more than a week at a time. As the years passed, however, he might be away for six months, trawling the pale waters of the Barents Sea in search of a diminishing supply of fish.

In communist times, the authorities tried to turn Razim from a salt water lake fed by the sea into a freshwater lake fed by the Danube. Dykes were built to seal it off, and artificial channels dug from the river. The experiment proved a disaster.
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There have been tentative attempts ever
since to restore these areas to their natural state. Similar efforts were made with the land. A vast network of dykes was built to win land for maize and rice. Some were successful at first, but rising salt in the soil destroyed the crops. The dream of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, the son of a village cobbler, to overcome ‘rural backwardness’ has been replaced by the dream of environmentalists to restore rural wilderness.
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We strike out across the hilltops. Visibility gets worse, despite the wind, and out of the swirling fog we catch glimpses of tall wind turbines in the distance, as though striding towards us. Attempts by the construction companies to erect them inside the delta have foundered on account of the opposition of the Greens, but almost everywhere else in Dobrogea construction continues at breakneck speed. The hunger of local councils for investment, subsidies from Brussels, and above all the powerful Dobrogean winds, keep the builders coming. Daniel fears for the migrating birds, for those that nest here all year round, and he worries about the impact of roads and power cables, the concrete and steel on the fragile ecosystem. ‘This is one of the wonders of Europe, and it shouldn't be destroyed by this kind of investment. But in Romania, the big money wins all the time. The developers snap up the land, build first and ask questions afterwards.’ On the road from Mahmoudia to Tulcea we follow striped concrete mixers, like wasps in a cloud of dust. Spanish, German, Romanian, French and American companies all compete for the same land and the same wind. ‘We're not against development, and we're not against wind energy, but whenever anything turns into this industrial scale, it's bound to cause harm. You just cannot have thousands of rotors, each the diameter of a football field, spinning round without a major impact. Most species of birds migrate at night. The birds are not stupid; they can dodge a few turbines, but what happens if they fly into hundreds of them? It's even worse for bats. They don't even need to be hit by the blades; the difference in pressure caused by the rotors makes their lungs implode as they pass.’

Environmental impact studies are funded by the investors themselves, and suggest no grounds for concern. But when ornithologists try to study the ground under the turbines for the corpses of birds, they are chased away by private security guards.

We drive in a wide loop to Murighiol – ‘purple lake’ in Turkish – named after the particular hue of the water – to see herring and black-headed
gulls, and a gaggle of greylag geese. The poplar trees wear the dark nests of rooks on their branches like rings on their fingers. Many have been taken over by red-footed falcons. No hunting is allowed on land owned by the Biosphere Reserve, so birds take refuge here.

We continue on through the village of Plopu, once famous for its thatchers. Most have migrated up the Danube to Britain or the Netherlands in search of better paid work. A line of white-fronted geese flies high over roofs on which red tiles have replaced the traditional covering. Thousands of black-tailed godwits rise in a cloud from a former fish pond. ‘They're just resting, fattening themselves up for the journey to Russia,’ says Daniel. Like curlews, godwits have beaks with a flexible tip, to grab the worms and crustaceans they find in the holes they dig in the mud. Fine dwarf reed lines the shore of the lake, the best quality for thatching, pure gold against a grey sky.

Coming into Tulcea, the rain beats against the windscreen and the road is crowded with concrete mixers. Is no compromise possible with the turbine builders? I ask. Couldn't a map be drawn up to avoid the areas most sensitive for migrating birds? ‘There was such an attempt, but the investors arriving now say it discriminates in favour of those who have already started work. They build wherever they find land that is suitable. I'm afraid this will continue until the profits drop, or the subsidies disappear.’

Grigore Baboianu is Director of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. On the wall of his modern glass office, overlooking the harbour in Tulcea, is a photograph of him with Jacques Cousteau. The famous French environmentalist travelled the length of the Danube from 1990 to 1992, gathering information on the health and diseases of the river from the pollutants he found stored in shells.
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‘You are lucky,’ Cousteau told Baboianu in Tulcea, ‘the Danube is still a living river, compared to the Rhine, but it will need a lot of help.’

In the 1950s, communism brought rapid, crude industrialisation to half of Europe still dozing in a semi-feudal slumber. The village of Pentele in Hungary became first Sztálinváros (Stalintown), then Dunaújváros (Danube New Town). Cities swelled on the banks of the rivers as babies boomed and people moved from the countryside to housing estates, which resembled the battlements of medieval castles. All human, chemical and
animal waste flowed back into the river, which processed and cleaned what it could in the reed beds and root systems of its remaining wetland flood plains, and spat out what it could not digest into the Black Sea. In the early 1990s, hundreds of giant communist era industrial plants along the Danube banks went bankrupt and closed down. When state subsidies and the vast bureaucratic energy of the totalitarian state were withdrawn, they stood little chance of survival.

The story with the farms was a little different. Huge state farms and cooperatives, from the Austrian border with Hungary all the way to the delta, turned the fields of the Middle and Lower Danube basin into food machines. Grain harvests grew year by year, with the soil pumped full of chemical fertilisers. Chemical factories lined the river, producing fertilisers and explosives. The factories flushed their waste into the river, while barges carried their products to market. Grain was transported down to Constanța for shipment across the oceans of the world, or upriver to Austria and Germany to feed the capitalist masses. When communism collapsed, the Danube breathed a massive sigh of relief.
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The pollutant stream in the drainage ditches from pig farms slowed from a flood to a trickle. Gypsies stripped the metal from the closed industries on the shores, to be sold as scrap, carried across the seas, and melted into iron girders to reinforce the concrete of the building boom in China and India. State farms were broken up into small units and peasants got back land, or compensation for it, which had been stolen from them in the great wave of nationalisations in the late 1940s. For a decade there was a dearth of tractors small enough to plough the small plots, with the Soviet and East German monsters rusting in the weeds. In the twenty-first century there is still a dearth of capital in the countryside. Some agribusinesses have been resurrected, often with foreign capital. There is a steady concentration of land in ever fewer hands, as the sons and daughters of the peasants who got back their patrimony decide they do not want to work it and sell it off. The food industry and breweries of Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were snapped up by foreign companies in the first wave of privatisations in the 1990s. Big supermarkets and hypermarkets have partly replaced the traditional open-air markets where people used to buy their fruit and vegetables and freshly slaughtered hens direct from the producers, but many markets still survive, because the food tastes better, you can see who grew it, and
the tomato on your plate can only gain from not having travelled two thousand kilometres from the plant which produced it.

Some factories have resumed work, with tighter laws on discharges into the river. Big European Union-backed projects to build state-of-the-art sewage works for cities such as Vienna and Budapest have helped clean up the waters. Now one of the biggest pollutants is plastic bottles, which float down on the current, bereft of messages, save that someone upstream was careless enough to leave them on the shore. Washed out into the Black Sea, they eventually disintegrate into a poisonous sludge on the sea bed that will be there for all time.

The task of the Biosphere Authority is to protect the delta after the depredations of the Ceauşescu years, and to help local communities make a living. Unfortunately, however, the two tasks do not always sit comfortably side by side. Local farmers and fishermen resent what they see as the interference of ‘the ecologists’, as they call employees of the Biosphere Authority. High unemployment in the 1990s left men in the delta with nothing to do except fish. Some use nets with illegally small mesh. Others attach electrodes to a car battery and plunge them into the water, which kills everything within a wide radius. Upstream in Serbia, hand grenades made plentiful by the wars of the 1990s are used to blow fish out of the water. In 2006 Romania banned sturgeon fishing. This was a good move to save the fish from extinction, but a heavy blow to the dedicated band of fishermen, especially in the delta, for whom sturgeon was by far the most valuable prize. Creative ways have been sought to help fishermen make a living. One idea Grigore Baboianu supports is for fishermen to be allowed one week in the year when they can fish for sturgeon. But that would be difficult to introduce just when Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine, after years of Romanian pressure, have brought in a general ban on sturgeon fishing in their own sections of the river. Another idea is aquaculture, that is breeding sturgeon artificially and reintroducing them to the river. There are already two sturgeon farms in Romania, one at Isaccea on the Danube, another near Bucharest. The Norwegian–Romanian project plans to introduce ‘sturgeon tours’ of the Danube.
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I first met Grigore in 2000 when I came to film pelicans in the delta. He gave us the use of a boat and a guide, while we paid the diesel for the outboard motor. The Authority was so short of funds its rangers could hardly patrol the
vast, semi-wilderness of the delta to prevent poaching. The trick with pelicans, our guide explained, is to behave like them. As such enormous birds themselves, they are not easily alarmed by other large creatures, such as humans, drifting down towards them on the current. We were almost among them before the more nervous birds identified us as short-beaked aliens, while the wiser, older birds, or perhaps just those who had been filmed so many times, remained tranquil on the calm waters among the reeds. The financial situation has not improved much since then, Grigore confesses, though the border police are better equipped, better funded, and in a much better position to protect the delta. Nets are confiscated, and those who fish during spawning periods when a ban is in force are punished. Only the humble pike can be caught in April and May.

On a Sunday morning in Tulcea, I go in search of the imam at the mosque a little way up the hill towards the museum. He's rushing to a funeral, but will be back later, and we can talk then, God-willing. But God has other plans for him, and at the appointed time there's no one in sight. After a brief wait in the cold of a March evening, I ring the doorbell at the Turkish–Romanian Friendship Association opposite, a low town house of just a single storey. The Turks governed Dobrogea for nearly five hundred years, and only lost their territories here in the 1870s. The remaining Turks have been transformed from rulers to an ethnographic oddity, but they have kept some of their treasures intact. A woman comes to the door and welcomes me inside like a prodigal son. A Turkish women's group has gathered for their weekly singing session: Vezza Sadula, Sabis Mahmet and Sabiha Ali lead the troupe. Some of the songs they have learnt on their annual trips to the Turkish heartlands, which they perform at folk festivals. But the best are old Turkish ballads from Dobrogea, about the Danube.

Why a Romanian lass would feel homesick beside the Danube, and where the Turkish lad arrived from, remain hidden in the mists of time. Tulcea was always a town for people in transit. It looks out towards the sea, and back up the Danube.

After four or five songs, the ladies are tiring, and one has lost her mobile phone. Soon the whole group is hunting high and low for it, and even the final chorus falls victim to the disappearance of new technology. Back in the small hotel in the harbour, I eat another perch then have an early night, lulled to sleep by the sound of waves lapping against the harbour and the cries of gulls.

CHAPTER
2

The Kneeling Oak