The article is devoted to the analysis of the research strategies of travelers and scientists of the second half of the nineteenth - first third of the twentieth centuries associated with the search and protection of endangered species of fur-bearing animals (West Siberian beaver and sable) in the Northern Urals and in the Ob region, which resulted in the creation of Ural State Beaver-Sable Hunting Reserve (later Kondo-Sosvinsky Reserve, 1929-1951). The article is based on fiction and journalistic texts, ego-documents by scientists and travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (I. Polyakov, K. Nosilov, P. Infantiev), monographs of biologists - employees of the Reserve, as well as the collections of the first director of the reserve V. Vasiliev and the employees from the museum of “Malaya Sosva” (a successor of Kondo-Sosvinsky Reserve). Some texts are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, providing an opportunity to trace the diversity of researchers’ positions, their dependence on contemporary challenges, the scientists’ personalities and the historical and cultural situation of the time. The texts by scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, separated by social catastrophes of the revolution and the Civil war, reveal a strong tendency to the inseparability of biology and ethnography in travel notes and descriptions of the beavers’ distribution areas. The correlation of ethnography and biology, colonial and postcolonial discourses, centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of the Ural region and the interdependence of environmental and management activities are revealed, allowing to expand the range of research approaches applied to these texts.