Bialowieza is a last European primeval forest
Wojciech Mikoluszko, "National Geographic Polska" magazine, October 03, 2006
Why a "heart"? - Just a heart. It's difficult to call it otherwise.
Why a "heart"? It baffled me. I was trying to grasp it, straining my ears for the words of the forest. But the Bialowieza Forest, at its best protected part on Belarus' side, speaks the language of nature I haven't known. People, whom I met, preparing to visit the only truly virgin forest on the European lowland, say it takes time and patience to learn it. Nearly all remaining wood stands on our continent are already controlled by men. We decide what tree species should grow on it. We plant them, look after them, protect them from herbivorous pests, and arrange selective felling. We take away dead trunks and brushwood, cut trees down when we think they are 'ripe', and we make up for it with so-called reforestation. Even the population of animals is subject to regulations. Big predators, such as wolf and lynx, have long disappeared in most places; hunters have taken over their roles of biological control. It depends on them how many and what wild boars, roe, and red deer may be culled, whether and how those remaining should be fed.
Only harsh, primarily wintry climate or rugged and marshy terrain could retain a primeval forest in the face of loose forest and hunting ground regulations. This is why such forests still exist in Siberia, Canada, the Amazonian region, and alpine parts of New Zealand. In densely populated Europe, the last patches of virgin nature can be found in a number of mountain ranges, in the aside-lying Scandinavian counties. They can also be found in the Bialowieza Forest.
Here, one can constantly see primary natural cycles. Here, trees grow for several hundred years, fall when their time comes, and decompose for the sake of a new generation. Weaker plants die, stronger and healthier live on. The same goes for animals. They have to take care of themselves through a winter hardship, and whether they live through it, is often a matter of whether acorns had a good yield in the autumn. The population of rodents or birds here has always been regulated by strong, deft (adept) and highly diverse predators. Leftovers after their feasts - or victims of severe winter cold - support, perhaps, the Europe's richest community of carrion feeders. A fight for life which doesn't stop here is favourable for an unusual biodiversity. One will have to look hard for another such place in Europe, where so many rare animal species would live side by side. This is also the only deciduous forest in the world, which lies on a flat and fertile land, at the heart of an overpopulated continent, and which lives in accord with its own rules. How did it manage to preserve them? Each of my interlocutors has their own answer to it.
Of all different circumstances which helped save the Bialowieza Forest, Nikolay Cherkas points to wetlands as the crucial one. He says they used to encircle the forest several hundred years ago, protecting it from anthropological pressure.
Professor Tomasz Wesolowski, of Wroclaw University, who has been studying birds in Bialowieza National Park for thirty years, argues that natural obstructions could not have been a major contribution. It's the ruling people who have helped the preservation, ironically by having kept the forest as a private hunting ground.
"Let's have a look at the map," adds Professor Bogumila Jedrzejewska, of Mammals Research Institute of the Poland's Academy of Sciences in Bialowieza. "Wetlands come near the forest just in the East. The western side has never had them. Of course, swamps secured it from destruction, but on one side only. On the other side, the boarder of the Bialowieza Forest looks as if it had been cut with a knife. If you drive from the West, it's all plains and flat fields, and then, all of a sudden, the forest comes into view. It was the royal property once. Other parts have been entirely cut down."
Since the 14th century, the Bialowieza Forest has been owned by royal families of Grand Dutchy of Lithuania. When prince Wladyslaw Jagiello married Polish queen Jadwiga in 1386, the two had the forest, later named Rzeczpospolita of the Two Nations, as their joint possession. It was Jagiello's inheritance, a sort of his personal territory.
What was established by Jagiello, survived through many years. The keepers, then called "osochniki", settled down in small villages around the Bialowieza Forest. Their jobs, inherited from father to son, had a lot of privileges, like land ownership, for example, granted by the king. In return, they had to look after bison and other game animals, regulate people's visits to the forest, fell the forest, as well as arrange the royal hunt. "Bison had been protected ad famam Regni, in glorification of the kingdom," explains Pofessor Jedrzejewska. At first, at the time of Jagiello the bison had been hunted mostly for its meat and as a way of army catering. Then, more often than not, for political reasons. A foreign diplomat, a Tatar khan or a pope's nuncio, could be first ushered into the forest to hunt for bison, and later, given the opportunity, discuss political issues.
The practice kept safe not only game animals but the forest in general. As the use of its rich natural resources, for instance, installment of hives, mowing of meadows, fishing, was a privilege for a limited number of people, the nature in the forest could go on with its rule.
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"The depths of the forest were considered once a place where gods and animals, its true keepers lived. This understanding comes naturally when one stands at night amid enormous oaks in the tract called Old Bialowieza. |
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A white-tailed eagle flew away scared by the sound of our footsteps, leaving the prints of its wings on the snow. |
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Villages in the Bialowieza Forest are inhabited mostly by elderly women. Their husbands live shorter lives, and children seek jobs in a town as soon as they come of age. It's best seen on religious holidays, such as Palm Sunday, in a church on Belarus' side of the boarder. |
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The Bialowieza Forest survived as the only primeval forest on the European lowland, to a large degree thanks to bison. For Polish kings, and later Russian tsars, these were the favourite game animals. To preserve their population, protective regulations had been introduced for the whole forest. |
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A white-tailed eagle on the carrion of a wild boar. |
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From the West, the especially protected part of the Polish Bialowieza boarders on the Narewka river valley. Until the 15th century, it had been covered with the forest. Then, locals cleared it for hay land. But usually, trees begin spreading to disrupted river valleys of the forest again. |
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The administrative centre on Belarus' side of the national park looks like a timber mill. The administration insists that processed here are only dry spruce trees, damaged by bark beetlea; a statement contested by environmentalists, who worry that live oaks are also cut down. |
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Photo by Paolo Volponi
Translated by Dmitry Kosach [anti-spam e-mail spelling: kosachidze(-@-)yahoo(dot)com]
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