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Andropov Village Schoolchildren Visited “Sholokhov Lakes”

On November 16, 2017, Sholokhov Museum workers gave a visiting class for the 8 form students of Andropov Village secondary school. It was devoted to the favourite hunting and fishing places of M.A.Sholokhov.

The children visited an observation deck “Osinki”, the place, where M.A.Sholokhov hunted woodcocks for the last time. The woodcock is known to make a stop in the Don floodplain during its migration. This is a big (as tall as a jackdaw) sandpiper with beautifully coloured plumage and with a beak reaching sometimes 10 sm. The children were very interested in such details.

In class, the children viewed the copies of photographs from the Museum collection, where Sholokhov is shown among the hunters. The children learned that hunting and fishing were a common hobby of the Sholokhovs’ family members, and that Mikhail Alexandrovich was an experienced hunter and fisher, he knew very well habits of birds and animals, fish places, and was a good shooter.

Then the children travelled to Lake Podolkhi, which is included in the natural complex “Sholokhov Lakes” and in the list of the Rostov Region cherished landscapes. Here the students learned about species diversity of its inhabitants. Most of all they liked a story about a muskrat. For the first time the children learned that this animal is the same age as the mammoth, and that earlier it was exterminated for the skin and musky fluid, which led to a sharp reduction in its population. The muskrat was included in the Federal and International Red List of Threatened Species.

The visiting class helped the children to learn more about the animal world of Sholokhov native country and of the whole Don region.

Ivan Kozelnikov