Sergei Kirpichev slips inside his front door and emerges in a frayed black coat. "I had to change -- otherwise the birds won't recognize me," says the 62-year-old ornithologist.


His pocket full of bread crumbs, Kirpichev walks behind the wooden house his grandfather built in Moscow's Sokol village, toward the homemade sheds where his hens and roosters perch majestically. Here, for more than 15 years, Kirpichev has raised his feathery charges to return them to the wild.


Even if they may not always recognize him, Kirpichev knows his fowl. Whether it is the red grouse, the large and elusive capercaillie, the wild turkey or the everyday chicken, he knows their breeding patterns, their migration patterns, their development patterns -- even their history.


"Do you know what the real treasure of the ancient Egyptians was? It wasn't the pyramids, but their incubators," says Kirpichev.


And while incubating birds does not seem as worthy of mystique as, say, the pyramids, it was nonetheless a tightly guarded secret. But Kirpichev, who has dedicated most of his life to studying these ancient methods, also knows a thing or two about incubation.


"Modern incubators are on a constant regime," says Kirpichev, cupping an egg in his hand for emphasis. "But in reality, it is better for the bird's development if the temperature is varied," he says, placing the egg on a table top and gently pushing down on it with his hand to indicate how it might naturally development under a hen's feathers.


"I can get 20 to 30 eggs a hen," says Kirpichev. The embryos either develop au naturel -- under a feathery breast -- or in Kirpichev's patented incubator. After they are hatched, Kirpichev and his son drive them out to a nature preserve some 300 kilometers northwest of Moscow, where they live alongside the birds for the first three months of their lives.


With this early experience in their natural habitat, the birds learn to react as they would if raised entirely in the wild. "Birds raised in technical breeding centers don't develop the reactions birds have and require in the wild," says Kirpichev.


After four months in the woods, Kirpichev leaves some of his flock behind and takes some back to Moscow, where they can begin again what he calls his "closed technological cycle" of breeding -- a model that can be adapted for any species of endangered fowl.


While the grouse sheltered in Kirpichev's homemade nest are not exactly endangered in Russia, their numbers in Europe have seriously dwindled. In fact, in the 1970s he and his birds traveled to what was then East Germany to repopulate the country's nature reserves. And just last year a Dutch firm delivered 60 eggs for Kirpichev to raise, of which 54 healthy birds were returned to Holland.


Kirpichev is not one to wait for his birds to make the Red Book -- Russia's list of endangered animals -- to perfect his methods of preserving them. "We're running out of time," he says. "By the time they start to disappear it will be too late."


Aside from the minimal funds he receives from a Russian environmental organization, Kirpichev and his birds must scrape by on his limited pension. He hopes to find additional support for his efforts from outside sources by raising birds for export.


"Nature knows no borders," says Kirpichev, adding that he can raise up to 100 birds per year, depending on the demand.


"There is only one law in life -- that everything must come to an end," Kirpichev waxes philosophically. "But we have to try to prolong life." And tending to his grouse is his own simple way of preventing the inevitable.