Biology_of_Mustelids_Vol_1.pdf

196.
In the fur harvest in Nov~sibirsk
province, the ermine ~ccupied
second place (about 30% of the value of all fur);
the decline began in
1934, evidently as a result of over-trapping (Klimov 1940). Some improve-
ment was recorded in the seasons 1939-40, 1943-44, and 1949-50.
The years
1952 to 1954 were particularly unfavourable; head trapper N.I. Blagoveshchenskii
reports that the number of ermines was then at its lowest.
In 1953-54
Novosibirsk province produced nearly 30 times fewer ermine pelts than in
the pre-war year 1939-40, when numbers were already comparatively low.
In 1954-55 ermine trapping was closed.
On the basis of his many years of observations, Yu.N. Klimov,
scientific co-worker of the Western Siberian VNIO laboratory, considers that
the prolonged depression in ermine numbers in Novosibirsk province is not
due to their food supplies, but that the short fall in deliveries is due to
the reduction in the number of trappers, or their lack of interest in
catching this animal.
The same thing happened in the forest-steppe zone of the eastern
part of the European territory of USSR.
In the Tartar, Bashkir and Mordov
ASSR, in Kuibyshev, Chkalov and some other provinces there was a bumper
"harvest" of ermine in the 1927-28 season.
In the following years the
yield fluctuated generally with a downward tendency;
there was an
especially sudden decrease in the 1939-40 season.
In the Tartar ASSR, in years of high ermine numbers, the number
of tracks on a 10 km route passing through flooded terrain reached 60, but
in 1946 only 2 tracks were recorded (Popov 1947).
In the 8ashkir and
Tartar ASSR, deliveries of ermine pelts during the 1953-54 season were down
by nearly 44 times compared with 1927-28 (Fig.2).
The value of ermine
pelts as a proportion of the total fur harvest in 8ashkir ASSR was 16%
in 1927-28, 0.9 % in 1940, 0.1% in 1953; in Tartar ASSR, 7.4, 1.6 and 0.4%.
In the first years of the War, the numbers of many species of
commercial animals (and consequently, of pelts harvested) went up noticeably,