The bottom of the swamp

The place where life is warming up

The only 12 millionth Moscow Center for the Salvation of Wild Birds "The Boys of the Swamp" dies. Debts for electricity, lack of feed, medicines and elementary domestic amenities crush mercilessly. But the mistress of the center hopes for a miracle and continues to nurse her sick pets.

In the summer, in the village of Vyakhirevo, Tolche Dachniki, in the village of Vyakhirevo, in winter life is warm in three houses. On the outskirts of the village, blown by winds from all sides, there is a house in one room. Inside, he looks like a large nest. A goose of Ivy walks around the room, slowly moving orange paws. Behind the temporary walls-spacers are silhouettes of birds: Orthodox and crows. Near the front door, wild ducklings, suffering from rickets, hiss on the unceremonious hands of a person who change their litter. Classes, ducks live in the attic, and three ducks and a dove fly under the roof.

The smell of grain and bird droppings.

The director of the Center for Assistance to Wild Birds “The bottom of the swamp” Alena Reznichenko conjures over a large frying pan with potatoes (the electric stove is barely working), glancing behind the gusen duck. A two -week goose with a yellow spot on his back collapsed in a home -made hammock (an inverted stool, a towel stretched between the legs) in the middle of the kitchen. His foot is not bent. On this paw, a holey pink sock hangs in the side - it is cold in the house.

- Brought on Saturday evening with the wild hypertonicity of the right foot. We showed his doctor, he said that his tendon was torn. He was bitten by a dog.

The people who found him immediately watered him with vodka, iodine - that it is impossible to birds. These are alcohol -containing, and birds have very delicate skin.

If the course of intra -surveillance injections and massage will not give a result, then the baby will have to euthanize ... Leaving it for the lying is too cruel. - Alena holds the gawn on his knees, he buried his head in her armpit. “Mom, how is it? Why doesn't the paw work? " - as if he asks Alena's voice.

Alena looks like a beautiful crow: lush short black hair, the strands of the face are laid behind the ears, a nose with a hump.

While Alena nurses a duck, Ivi goose, stretching out her neck from behind the fence, glances with jealousy at the new one, climbing higher at Alena’s mattress, covered with a pledged sheet. There are no beds in the house yet - everyone is sleeping on mattresses, almost on the floor.

Previously, another goose lived in the house, named Amadeus, at home, Dyush. On the refrigerator, faded magnets with it are a powerful goose with a hump on its beak.

- He was born with the parents of our volunteer Vera Pakhomova (she now has her own center for helping the Birds of the Voronnya Nest in Moscow). Parents for the sake of entertainment lift geese, turkeys, then they kill them every year. They cannot eat so much, so they distribute to friends. All 50 were killed, and they felt sorry for the latter. And they asked his daughter to find a house for him. So he came to me, although I was not going to start geese. I immediately put him on the bed, spread a diaper and said: "Dyusha, you will sleep here." He was slightly fucked up, sleeping with me night, then the next day he said: "I have short paws, but I need to go to the bed." Unlike Ivi, which shows everywhere, he is only on a diaper. And there were never any problems with him.

Every morning, Alena calmly released a flock of ducks under the supervision of Dyushi on the pond. So, one day, Dyusha stomped along the path through the field to the pond, Ivi walked the second, and behind them are a horde of ducks. At 11 in the morning, Alena came for them, call home.

- I see feathers. The ducks with Ivi hid on trees in the middle of the pond. There is no one duck, no Dyushi. I ran in tears, hung ads, interviewed everyone. Then she calmed down, went around the terrain. Here we had bushes.

Dyusha cut off the head and neck with a chip and just cut a couple of pieces from the chest. I don’t know why they have the head of the goose. Apparently, people were drunken, because the sober goose would be cut out.

And I never found a duck, - Alena holds a cigarette between the middle and ring fingers. Black varnish on the tips of the nails is chopped. Between the large and index - a heart is a heart, a “kiss” from Orlan Vasily.

After the incident, Alena closed the reception of birds before the site was surrounded by a fence. A tall, deeply going into the ground, will cost 390 thousand.

Alena did not plan to equip her life in this way. I planned just in a different way. Ten years ago, she threw the Veterinary Academy and went as an administrator to cinema, wanted to leave for the USA, make a fiction movie there. But once in Perovo stumbled upon a sick pigeon:

- The pigeon sat so unhappy, drooling. I picked him up, a patient with a trichomonosis. This is when the dove can neither eat nor drink - a cork of bacteria forms in his throat, and the dove dies simply from thirst. This is treated all very easily in a week, and then the bird can be returned to nature. I cured him from trichomonosis, but he died of another infection.

Previously, if someone treated birds, then only red-blown or rare. City pigeons, according to Alena, died in packs.

After the first dove, Alena took a crow as a pet. But it was inconvenient with a raven in a Moscow apartment, so Alena returned to her mother, to a private house in Noginsk.

-They somehow called me: “Are you engaged in the salvation of birds? Here, a tank fell into our ventilation. We will bring him to you now. ” They learned about me by mouth. Further, familiar zoo guards say: “Why do you take syringes in retail? Take in bulk. " They began to take in bulk, then they thought that the birds in the house were cramped, built the first aviary, then they started a group on Facebook - so in 2014 the center for helping wild birds “The bottom of the swamp” appeared.

Today, the "bottom of the swamp" is a plot of 4.6 acres in the village of Vyakhirevo with a small pond (there are many waterfowl in the center). Money for the construction of aviaries was collected through the Planeta.ru platform, collected 150 thousand, another 150 were given “sponsors” - Alena herself, her mother and relatives.

- It was October, it was already cold enough. We put two greenhouses here, moved with the whole belongings and birds, set some aviaries and spent the night in this greenhouse for a week with the birds. Then they built this house in a week, not at all insulated. They wintered in it. Throughout the whole winter, only one gull of a pan died of us, but not from hunger-cold, but from Aspergillosis. She had a very neglected form. The first time we slept in jackets-steps covered with a bunch of blankets. The drinker of the geese, which stood near me, completely froze.

That winter they drowned the potbelly stove, but she was naughty and did not warm at all. Now the house is heated by two small thermal tents.

Alena talks about bird fate. Here is a seagull teapot with one wing. He was a healthy chick. Alena raised him, and there was a woman with a teenage daughter who took him.

-A year later, they bring it to me in a completely terrible state: the rotten membranes are all in ulcers, some kind of butter. Plus aspergillosis, ”recalls Alena. - They said that they did not have time to treat him.

Then they wanted to pick him up, but so he stayed with us. We had a raven Kitik, the cat was bought by people from poachers. We went to the doctor, he is completely healthy. He flew here, tried to communicate with other crows. A wild raven arrives, and their sound is: "Cr-Cro-Cro." Kitty to him: "Ve-ow-wing." He looks at him - they say, what is it? As a result, ours learned, began to fly with crows. At first, he flew to feed, then just didn’t take food anymore, that is, he learned to get it. Then he stopped flying, but he was visible when he flies with others.

Recently, Alena called at night from Yoshkar-Ola: they found three rickets. This is 800 km from Moscow, there was no better shelter for them. Indeed, there are not many centers for wild birds in Russia. There is in Kazan, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, in Moscow, in addition to the “bottom,” there is a “crow's nest”, but it takes birds only for rehabilitation and mainly a raven.

Many veterinarians are simply afraid to deal with birds.

In 2016, Alena returned to her studies and graduated from a vetacademic.

- People once brought me a bird after the “treatment”, they say: “He has abrasion there on the bend of the wing.” I raised the wing, and there such a hole, and the bone sticks out of it. They tell me that the doctor did not look there ... Stunning unprofessionalism! A bird from a cat, from a dog, from a guinea pig is no different. To process the wound, remove maggots, just rinse - this is the same for everyone. Sew something, amputate-for example, a wing. Joints - they are all the same. Or here with pigeons. Pigeons are considered to be the peddles of the infection, so they are not allowed to the threshold of the clinic. I myself had this when I was looking for a clinic in Noginsk, where we can make an X -ray to the birds. Only in one they said: "Not a question." In everyone else, they were afraid to become infected with ornithosis. And no one is afraid of the fact that they are brought to them, which have a lot of general infections with a person, and quite dangerous.

The last time Alena was on vacation two years ago.

-Everything needs to be controlled, because of this I get tired most. It does not work to relax morally.

Every morning you wake up and think: you need this, you need to find money, you need to take it off, here you need to find volunteers, here you need to screw the light bulb.

Even if the volunteers do something, the responsibility for everything lies on me. I can’t say to people: “This is the volunteer, so it turned out like this.”

On August 3, the mistress of the "bottom" for one day escaped to the "picnic of the posters". Two yellow raincoats remained from the holiday, now dotted with claws.

Alena volunteers are guys from 14 to 25 years old, they are similar to the tires - chicks who have already operated on, but still fly badly.

“Only teenagers go to the volunteers to me,” says Alena. -Boys-volunteers are not interested in girls, do not go to party, they have no friends, they do not communicate with anyone. Lonely enough, they have no communication in society, they are grown mainly by grandmothers and mothers. They find a company here, some kind of society. They feel useful: he built something there, saved someone, fed. As a result, I see their development, and it is very pleasant to observe. And they somehow stretch to me themselves-apparently, I have a strong maternal instinct. But, on the other hand, I do not attract people who could take responsibility. These boys all follow me with a flock, like Ivi, and if I suddenly go there for a week, they will sit and wait for Alena.

Now Andrey and Nastya live with Alena.

- For buckwheat, Andrei works here. Yesterday I cooked buckwheat on chicken broth for raven and a little buckwheat for volunteers, but without adding chicken, ”Alena laughs with a cigarette sticking to her lip.

Andrei looks like a hippie: a strong tall guy with brown curves on the shoulders taken under a rim of two twisted wires, dark -skinned skin, a three -day stubble. Andrei is 23 years old, he came from Irkutsk.

The first birds of Andrei were the blue forty monk and forty ordinary Fedka, whom he found wounded. Monka was shot down by a car, and Fedka had a chick from a nest. Andrei then studied in the second year of the Irkutsk Polytechnic Institute. When the military father found out that his son was throwing the institute, he said: “Throw your fucking chicken that I endured while you studied!” Petettsev had to be given to the Irkutsk zoo gallery, where they found the owners. After that, Andrei flew to Minsk to work as a radio engineer.

In February 2018, he first arrived at the “Dno of the Swamp”, learned about him in bird forums.

-My hands come from where you need to grow, if you need to build an aviary, if you need to fix something. Now the fan has done so that it was not cold. As a result, it turned out that I don’t need it anywhere else as here. - Andrei drags two more raw potatoes from a frying pan with two fingers. Burning fingers. For a few months of living, here he dropped 10 kg.

Now Andrei is building a winter road, then it will spend electricity there.

Nastya came to the "bottom of the swamp" in May last year. One could have encountered her in the fashionable Moscow club: a short haircut with shaved temples and a round frame on the nose.

- I had nothing to do with the birds at all. For a long time I wanted to be a zoovonter. Kits, dogs - all this garbage. I was a volunteer in a dog shelter for two years. A friend told me about the "bottom". And I decided to try. - Nastya takes out frozen chickens and a twisted white rat from the refrigerator - everything will go to the feed to the predators. - I'm a little strange. I can leave somewhere in an unknown direction. I’ve been here for a year now, and my mother is not very happy that I have stayed here because she has a picture in my head: I had to graduate from the institute this year, then get a job in my specialty, everything is fine ... But I realized that I did not really want to do documentation, because I always wanted to be a pathologist.

Nastya falls silent and cuts the frozen rat in half.

How to help

Currency of the received translation: RUBL (RUB)
Recipient: Lyubimov Maxim Sergeevich
Account number: 40817810308001105073
Recipient Bank: Bryansk branch N8605 PJSC Sberbank
BIC: 041501601
Corr. Account: 30101810400000000601
TIN: 7707083893
GPP: 325702001
Swift code: Sabrrumm

PS

The duck's husser recovered: “Everything is fine with him. This impudent bastard that still lives in our kitchen, begging, provokes Ivy. ”