BLOOD AND ICEInside nomadic Siberian tribe during mass reindeer migration when tribesman drink BLOOD to survive the biting cold

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THESE astonishing pictures capture life in one of the Earth's most savage environments.

Siberian tribesman slaughter reindeer and drink their blood to stay alive in the Arctic tundra.


The brave men battle the elements in the Yamal-Nenets region where temperatures drop as low as -45°C.

In English the region's name roughly translates as "edge of the world".

Brit snapper Timothy Allen, best known for his work on BBC’s Human Planet, trekked through the freezing Siberian wilderness to capture the stunning images.

He trudged for 16 days as he joined part of an 800km migration of reindeer in the area.

The stunning pictures feature the nomadic Nenets tribe, who drink blood to survive in the freezing temperatures.

Timothy’s epic journey, which will be revealed in an eight-minute documentary on Animal Planet, saw him travel across the bleak terrain of the frozen Ob River with the Nenets people in December last year.

The experienced photographer admitted if anything had gone slightly wrong he could have been dead in 10 minutes.

Timothy said: “In all honesty, I’m a 44-year-old bloke, but stuff like this still scares me. If something goes wrong out there, you could be dead in 10 minutes.

“Siberia is not a pleasant place to be in the middle of winter. I think this is possibly the most inhospitable place I’ve been to.

“We picked the coldest, darkest, harshest time of the year to go there and I think we paid the price.”

The Nenets migrate more than 1,000 miles on hand-made, wooden sledges every year; they live in reindeer-hide tepees, dress in reindeer fur clothes and eat raw reindeer meat – and Timothy had to make sure he followed these distinctive practices extremely closely just to survive.

Leading a nomadic existence on the Arctic tundra for thousands of years, there are still 10,000 members of the Nenets tribe who command a reindeer flock of approximately 300,000.

Timothy said: “This is a tribe of herders and hunters and this is at their core, this is their soul.

I’m fascinated by cultures that still exhibit their traditional values.
“There are some fundamental things, which they cannot let go of and they’re all connected to the reindeer.