MOSCOW, December 21. /TASS/. Afanasiy Tesida was born and lives in the Yamalo-Nenets Region. He has been working with the Gazpromneft-Development Company in the region’s Tazovsky District. In 2020, he has won the Person of the Year - Yamal 2020 prize in Ecology for the rescue of a baby seal.
Afanasiy says he is always attentive to the nature, and thus, when only he saw the wild animal asked for help, there were not hesitations.
"The seal has come to the rig, to people, and my colleagues had noticed it. It was in late April. The weather was bad that time, and the animal could not find the hole in the ice, through which it had come. Seals can hear well, and that one heard people and got to us," Tesida said.
Baby in distress
By the time the seal managed to crawl to people, it was practically frozen - it had crawled about 5 kilometers searching for an escape.
Afanasiy took it into the arms. It was a pup, not more than 12 months old. The baby weighted about 15-20 kilograms.
"Luckily, nobody had attacked it. We warmed it up. And then, our manager asked me to let it go back into the water. I am a local, and surely I have everything needed to drill the ice. You know, it is not just letting a seal out whenever you want, as it may get frightened. Thus, we decided to let it into the water near the Gaz-Sale settlement," Tesida said.
They drilled a hole through the ice, which was 160 cm thick. "In our region, the frosts are very strong, and the ice becomes very thick, but the driver and I did manage," he said.
Where it came from
Afanasiy says, seals could have come there earlier. However, not all animals can make it to people: they may be attacked by foxes and crows.
"Snow here lies for nine months a year, and fishing on lakes is outlawed. At the same time, without holes in the ice fish dies of a shortage of oxygen. A seal, smelling fish, makes holes in the ice - with its own warmth it may melt a hole within 4-6 hours or it may dig it out by claws," the man said.
However, heavy snow storms, which are often on Yamal, may sweep snow over big holes, through which seals could have returned into the water. And then animals have to search for help.
The prize
The story about the rescued pup rolled across the region, and local reporters, who interviewed Afanasiy, nominated him for the prize, which was organized in 2020 for the first time.
The Person of the Year - Yamal 2020 prize was established five years earlier in Yamal’s southernmost city - Noyabrsk, and in 2020 it progressed to the regional level.
In 2020, the prize had ten nominations, Elena Vorotyagina, Deputy Chief Editor of the Noyabrsk-24 television channel (a part of the Arctic Media Holding, the prize’s initiator) said.
"We have invited the regional television to take part in the project. Television companies offered their nominees and every company appointed three persons to the jury. The decision was: in 2020, Afanasiy was wonderful, and he won the Ecology nomination," she said.
Other nominees in Ecology were mostly volunteers.
"Our key approach was to nominate ordinary people. Not those, who work in the ecology sector. Our prize is for those who could not walk past a problem, for those who did something good," she said.
Interestingly, nominees have not been informed about the competition until results were announced.
"The nominees did not know that reporters discussed them among the best - until the live program, where we announced the winners. They will receive a statuette, and - first of all - the widespread acclaim," she concluded.
"I rescue animals often"
Afanasiy said he was happy to learn he was the Person of the Year in the region. At the same time, he said what he did was nothing extraordinary.
"Of course I was flattered to learn that I am the winner. But for me it was nothing special - I rescue animals often, because we live in the nature. We do not trouble or hurt anyone," he said.
One day, he rescued a kite, which had smashed into a car and fainted. For two days, the bird stayed in a box. On the third day, it recovered and was released. Afanasiy says it must have left for the south.
"On another occasion, I rescued a wolf pup in the tundra. It must have lost its ways, and I found the den and returned it to there. About six months later it thanked me when I was hunting deer. My wolf attacked a deer and left the venison to me. Most probably, it was that very pup, which had grown older," Afanasiy said.
The Yamalo-Nenets Region is located mostly north of the Arctic Circle, and the other part is on the slope of the Urals ridge. The climate is cold. Some areas have the perennially frozen soils. The cold Kara Sea is nearby. Winters continue for up to eight months (whereas in the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones they are not longer than 68 days).