The Białowieza
Forest in eastern Poland is somewhere I have always wanted to go –
the only genuinely virgin, untouched lowland forest in Europe. Last
week I finally got to go there, thanks to friend and colleague
Małgosia Kiedrzynska who
organised the trip. The scale of the place is immense and to us, used
only to 'forest' being small areas of woodland, overwhelming. At
1,400 square kilometres it is almost the size of London. The border
between Poland and Belarus goes more or less down the middle.
At
the moment the forest has a somewhat higher 'recognition factor' than
normal, owing to the proposals by the Polish Ministry of the
Environment to allow tree felling in supposedly protected areas. See the Guardian article here.
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/31/poland-continue-logging-biaowieza-forest-despite-eu-court-ban>
What
is intriguing for the British visitor is to see familiar species we
all share as natives, both trees and perennial ground flora, growing
in very different ways. Everything on one level is totally familiar
and on another level very different. Take the trees for a start.
There is oak, although it is nothing like as dominant as it would be
at home. Oak at home branches low down, even when fairly densely
planted, but here the trunks soar upwards, dead straight for 15m,
maybe even 20m, and then branch out rather sparsely; they look more
like something out a tropical rain forest than anything I'm familiar
with. And alder, great dense stands of them, dead straight and
soaring upwards, at least half as much again in height with what we
are familiar with from British riverbanks.
There
is (on the Polish side) a protected core area, which you can only
enter with a guide. It is surprisingly light, with a high canopy, a
mix of hornbeam, lime (Tilia
cordata), ash, maple
(Acer platanoides)
and oak. Very few trees are actually that big, for reasons I didn't
get to understand. What is intriguing is the ground layer. Lots of
indicators of high fertility like ground elder and nettle, but they
are sparse and mixed up with a huge range of other species. We are so
used to seeing both these plants as aggressive weeds, but here it is
presumably lower light levels that keep them in check and allow for
greater diversity. In fact ground elder is almost universal in light
shade everywhere I went on this trip (Latvia southwards) which gives
you a different perspective on it compared to the “ohmygod what a
terrible weed” attitude we have at home where it is not actually
native.
The
forest is divided up into a whole series of segments on a grid, put
in place by the Russians when it was an Imperial Forest in the latter
part of the Romanov regime. Each grid is marked with numbers, which
makes it actually very hard to get lost. Different grids are managed
differently, with many being commercially managed and others under
varying levels of protection. This all means that in travelling
around (which we did on bikes) you get to see an enormous range of
woodland types: different tree compositions, different
soil-determined habitats, and different types of management. And
water level, which was particularly interesting.
Much
of lowland Britain probably had forest like this, very wet, and at
times flooded. Now we have almost none. In fact we have no river
floodplain forest at all, and haven't had any for centuries, only a
tiny bit of alder carr (wet alder woodland) and very other little wet
woodland – most was drained or drained and cleared in the 19th
century. Being here and seeing these vast swampy woodlands, where it
was simply too wet to risk walking across, gave me a sense of what a
lot of lowland Britain must have once looked like. And then there is
one area, conveniently located near our hotel, which is spruce over a
peat bog, but mysteriously given the obviously acidic conditions, the
sphagnum moss etc, there were some (famously nutrient-hungry)
nettles. Apparently this is the most westerly example of the habitat
that covers vast areas of Siberia – the taiga.
So
what about the notorious tree felling which has broght Białowieza
into prominence? There is a whole patchwork of old-growth forest
outside the main protected zone which the environment ministry has
started to extract timber from, under the guess of controlling spruce
bark beetle, threatening a uniquely old habitat. Commercial factors
are of course thought to be the real reason; presumably because the
old-growth trees are bigger or better quality than the truly epic
amount of younger material which could be felled without damage to
old-growth forest. The forest does seem very poorly managed from a
commercial point of view however. I noticed masses of felled timber,
much of it presumably felled for safety reasons along roads, where it
had clearly been left for years. I suspect the real reason for
felling is political provocation, as the current Polish government is
one of the few foreign admirers Donald Trump has, and which is
similarly dividing families and friends.
To see it in English tap the Union Jack in the top right hand corner.
