In the Russian Ukraine the economic importance of hunting is as slight as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere in this region do we find a developed, profitable hunting industry Even in the Polissye hunting is not very important and is at most an avocation for a few forest settlers. Here rabbits, roes, boars, elk, grouse, wild fowl and water-game are sometimes hunted. Bison and beaver hunting is now very strictly forbidden. Many foxes and badgers are killed and a relatively large number of bears and wolves. Volhynia is much poorer in game, and still poorer are Podolia, and the districts of Kiev, Poltava and Kharkiv. In all the places, the most that one can get a shot at, aside from wild fowl, is rabbits and foxes, and sometimes wolves. In the forests and swamps of the Chernihov country there is a somewhat greater abundance of game. Hunting is most important, relatively, in the southern part of the Ukraine, on the Black Sea border and in the Caucasus lands. Besides roes, rabbits, and foxes, there are hunted in the steppes: wolves, sayga-antelopes and wild dogs; and in the Caucasus: bison, stags, bears, and lynx. The number of steppe and waterfowl, e. g., bustards, partridge, quail, wild geese and wild ducks, and of mountain fowl, as pheasants, mountain-quail, and grouse, is still considerable. Collecting the eggs of waterfowl is still a remunerative occupation. On the shores of the Caspian Sea 130,000 Caspian seals are killed every year.
Of much greater importance than hunting is the fishing industry. It is only a weak reminiscence of what it once was, yet it remains to this day an important economic element. The Ukrainian fishing industry is carried on in three regions: on the high sea, in the river-mouths, and in the interior of the land, in rivers, lakes and ponds.
The actual sea-fishing industry attains relatively slight results, on the average 24J/£ million kilograms a year. On the Black Sea, along the shores of Bessarabia, Kherson and Tauria, a great amount of mackerel, sardines, herrings and sturgeon-like fish are caught. The main fisheries of the northern Pontian shore are situated at the Kinburn bar, at the island of Tendva, in the Bay of Karkinit, at Cape Tarkhankut, at Eupatoria, Balaklava, Yalta, Sudak, and Theodosia. Fishing on the high seas, because of its great cost, is undertaken only by the large enterprising companies, who hire the Ukrainian fishing companies (artili) for the entire summer. Of late, fishing on a small scale has begun to develop. The small fishermen catch chiefly mackerel, which are then salted, or, less often, smoked. They also go after the small but savory Black Sea oysters, of which an average number of one million a year are gathered.
Far greater profit is yielded by the fisheries at the mouths of the rivers, in the limans, and particularly on the largest liman of all, the Sea of Azof. The annual yield here attains an average of 140 million kilograms. At the mouths of the Danube the chief fishing center is Vilkiv. Toward the end of the 19th century there lived at this place 900 independent fisherman, who sometimes united to form artils. Here they catch chiefly sturgeon and other fish of the sturgeon class (on the average 30,000 a year), and four and a half million of Pontian herrings. At the mouths of the Dniester, Boh and Dnieper, chiefly river fish are caught. Herrings and sturgeon-like fish are of minor consequence here. The fishermen in this region are always organized either in artils, in which the profits are shared equally among the members, or in so-called takhvi, which are hired by the entrepreneurs. The chief center of the fishing trade and of the putting up of canned fish, is Odessa. Yet the Bay of Odessa cannot compare with the Sea of Azof in fish production. The average value of the annual haul here exceeded a million rubles in the latter years of the 19th Century. Over 11 million kilograms of sturgeonlike fish and other large fish, besides 7 million herrings, were caught here annually. In some winters more than 70,000 fishermen, with 20,000 to 30,000 horses and oxen, gather on the frozen Sea of Azof. ' With gigantic nets, which are sometimes nearly two kilometers long, a very profitable fishing industry is carried on here. Important fishing centers, with great freezing plants and works for salting and smoking, are situated in Osiv (Azof) and Kerch. The members of the fisher artils come principally from the Poltava and Kharkiv country.
The Ukrainians may also claim a rather prominent part in the fishing industry of the Caspian Sea, which yields more than half a billion kilograms of fish annually. The Ukrainian Caspian fishermen come from Ukrainian colonies on the Volga, and from the eastern parts of the Ukraine proper.