The Danube Read Free

fish finally reached the surface. Exactly 164 days after he was released, Harald resurfaced 11 kilometres off the Crimea. During that first night, according to the information beamed to the Argos satellite, he travelled at a steady fifteen kilometres an hour – presumably on the deck of a fishing boat. Harald had been caught. He was still alive, probably, but only just.
    Another remarkable feature of the sturgeon is its ability to live for days out of water. A huge beluga caught by Serbian fishermen at Apatin in 2003was wrapped in a fisherman's blanket on the shore for several hours, then succeeded in unwrapping itself and rolling back down the bank into the water to escape. Before it eluded them, its captors noted the remains of several rusting hooks in its side. That was more than twenty years after the Iron Gates dam on the Romanian–Serbian border cut off the sturgeon from its traditional breeding grounds in the Danube shallows between Hungary and Slovakia. The fish must either have been stranded upriver when the dam was built, or slipped into the locks beside a laden barge, to continue a migration route denied to the rest of its species.
    After Harald was caught and brought ashore, the satellite tracked him for two more days. The last signal came from the nearby railroad station, in Saki. Harald was about to start travelling inland by train. One wonders what those who caught him, or bought him, made of his transmitter. The project has revealed much about the migration routes of sturgeon, but few of the fish have sent back as much information as Harald. Some have still not resurfaced. Others have done so, but the data they sent to the satellite was garbled. The skies above the Black Sea hum with satellite signals between Russian naval ships and the military base at Sevastopol. The Black Sea is Russia's window on the wars and revolutions of the Middle East. 5
    The pride of Radu's shoebox is a small, perfect sturgeon, barely longer than his hand, the gift of his professor, Nicolae Bacalbaşa. In the early 1970s, Professor Bacalbaşa realised that sturgeon were dying out in the Danube. Over-fishing, pollution, and the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric dam devastated sturgeon stocks, just as the building of the Volgograd dam in Russia had in the Volga, a decade earlier. Only a tenth the number of beluga sturgeon were caught in 1980 compared to that in 1930. Bacalbaşa dedicated the remaining decades of his long life to try and save them. 6
    His first problem was with the fishermen – they refused to tell him where sturgeon could be caught. This was a closely guarded family secret, taciturn Romanian fishermen explained, handed down from father to son. Undeterred, Nicolae Bacalbaşa parked his Trabant near the bridge at Hârsova, where men still stand at the roadside, their arms spread akimbo, to mime the huge catfish of their buckets or their imaginations, and wandered upstream. He was in no hurry. Each evening he pitched his tent,and all day he chatted to anyone he met along the banks of the river. After three days he struck gold. A casual glance into the wooden barrel beside a lone angler revealed his first sturgeon. The angler came from faraway Moldova each year, fished until his barrel was full, salted them, then drove his catch home, to feed his family for the winter and sell off the surplus. Embarrassed to be told by the learned professor that he had caught a rare species, he implored his visitor to take it away. And that was the perfect specimen which Radu now handed me. From the size of the fish and the season, Bacalbaşa deduced that sturgeon overwinter in the Danube, rather than returning to the warmer, saltier waters of the Black Sea.
    Bacalbaşa and his team taught themselves to catch sturgeon from such titbits of information, culled from fishermen and their own observations. Young adult fish enter the Danube every three to five years to spawn, while older fish make the journey only every ten to