Ushkany Islands
"I've watched a lot of wildlife show up on cue for tourists. This wasn't that — the nerpas just didn't care we were there."
Four remote marble islands in northern Baikal where wild nerpa seals haul out on the rocks, reachable only by licensed boat.
Lia found the boat operator through a message board thread that hadn’t been updated since 2019, which should have worried me more than it did. Getting to the Ushkany Islands isn’t something you just decide to do from Irkutsk — you go through a licensed operator working inside Zabaikalsky National Park, you accept that the seal colonies come first and your itinerary comes second, and you wait for a weather window in the Maloe More strait that may or may not open. Ours opened on a flat, silver morning in early July, and I remember thinking the lake looked more like a held breath than water.
The four islands sit in the northern reach of Baikal, and Bolshoi Ushkany, the largest, is the one everyone comes for. It’s built from ancient marble and limestone, pale and worn smooth in places, and as we cut the engine and drifted the last stretch toward shore, our guide pointed at what I’d mistaken for boulders. They moved. Nerpa — Baikal’s freshwater seal, the only seal species on earth that lives its entire life in fresh water — were draped across the rocks in loose clusters, gray and silver-brown, utterly unbothered by our presence at a respectful distance.
What got me wasn’t the seals alone, it was the strangeness of the whole equation: a lake so old and so deep that it grew its own seal, isolated from any ocean for longer than most species have existed, on islands so restricted that researchers still treat them as an active laboratory. Our guide, who’d spent two summers here on a nerpa monitoring project before switching to tours, kept lowering her voice without seeming to notice she was doing it, like the place asked for it. We were only allowed to land in one small area, cameras rather than voices doing most of the observing.
Lia spent most of the return crossing not talking, which for her is the highest compliment a place can get. I think about that stretch of water more than I expected to — how something this protected, this deliberately hard to reach, ends up feeling like the most honest wildlife encounter either of us has had. Nobody trained those seals to show up for us. They were just already there, doing what they’d been doing for longer than anyone’s been counting.
When to go: Aim for summer, June through August, when the nerpa haul out in numbers on the rocky shores and the strait is calm enough for licensed boats to actually make the crossing.