Blooming flowers and insomniac bears amid warm Russian temperatures

Dec 15, 2006, 14:01 GMT

Moscow - Winter starts early in Russia, with the first day of the season considered December 1.

But halfway through December, winter has yet to get underway in the country's capital: As of December 15, Moscow temperatures had so far not dropped below zero.

The month began with a record-high temperature of 4.5 degrees Celsius on December 1. The mercury set more records December 9-11 with three days of highs near 7 degrees.

And the month has seen an average temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius - 10 degrees higher than the norm, and on par with mid-October temperatures.

But as television news programmes show spring-time flowers like tulips and narcissus blooming in Russia's imperial-era capital of St Petersburg, some zoologists are worried Mother Nature is doing Mother Russia's flora and fauna little good.

'Bears in particular cannot hibernate,' Arkady Tishkov, assistant director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Geographical Institute, told the news agency Interfax on Friday. 'They can't feed normally, and they lose the energy reserves they had saved up for winter.'

While the false wake-up call for animal and plant life is not always harmful, Tishkov said he was concerned about any sudden drops in temperature.

'Southern plants that have bloomed - as well as crops of winter plants - can suffer from a quick approach of cold weather,' Tishkov added.

With forecasts calling for the warm weather to continue into January - temperatures in the first month of the new year, according to Russia's federal weather service, will surpass averages by 1-2 degrees - there is an upside.

Frigid temperatures of minus 30 degrees across the country saw repeated warnings about possible failures in Russia's aging electricity infrastructure last winter, as people ran portable space heaters day and night to stay warm.

'If our forecast is realized, this weather will allow us to save fuel costs,' Gennady Yeliseyev, assistant director of the weather service, told Interfax.