“Don’t step off the path please!”
I find I have transgressed the rules of the legendary Białowieźa Forest National Park’s Strict Reserve Area by taking a half-step into light undergrowth to point out a particularly bizarre fungus, dead man’s finger.
The notion that there should be no human impact whatsoever on this particular ecosystem is deeply ingrained in its management, and is firmly interpreted by our guide, without whom the public cannot enter this part of the forest.
Białowieźa, a vast forest straddling Poland and Belarus, has long been the epitome of “unspoilt nature” in Europe, and with good reason, but not without the questions that phrase raises.
RM Block
Very little of it has ever been farmed, large areas have never been logged, and it is home to threatened and almost archaic animals such as European bison (some 30 per cent of the wild population), has a fair complement of wolves, lynx and beavers, and at least a dozen species of very active woodpeckers, not to mention owls.
It is exceptionally rich in tree species such as Norway spruce and hornbeam and small-leaved lime, and it is common enough to find oak trees several centuries old towering into the canopy. Its insect and other invertebrate richness is almost beyond number.
Why should such a vast area – 142,000 hectares in total, in a complex mosaic of often unmanaged woodlands – State Forestry, nature reserve, national park and strictly protected reserve – have survived in the central European lowlands? The answer is fairly straightforward; the ruling classes of the various political configurations that have dominated the region, especially the Lithuanian dukes and the Russian tsars but also, briefly, the Nazi Herman Goering, were determined to maintain it as a “pristine” reserve for elite hunting, especially of the totemic bison but also of the numerous deer.
In so far as human presence has been tolerated over the past few centuries, it has mostly been made up of small communities dedicated to protecting the royal game from poaching. Large-scale logging only began in many areas during and after the first World War.
This situation presents modern societies with tricky dilemmas. Very powerful logging interests in the Polish State Forests organisation see the area as ripe for massive extraction of timber, which they have practised in the forest’s managed areas.
Environmentalists see it as a unique opportunity to study, and learn from, a forest that has experienced so little human management. If we want to understand what nature does in our absence, they argue, there can be few better opportunities than the least disturbed parts of Białowieźa.
[ Ireland has a dismal amount of tree cover but ‘wild’ is partly between our earsOpens in new window ]
Over the past decade and more there has been a bitter controversy over the appropriate response to a massive infestation of spruce bark beetles, which have killed many of the Norway spruce. Foresters, and Polish conservative politicians, argued the best strategy was “sanitary”, to massively log the spruce in affected areas to prevent the spread of the beetle, even in the most highly protected areas.
Environmentalists argue the infestation is itself a natural phenomenon, an inherent part of the unruly history of an ecosystem that is repeatedly transformed through storms, fires and native pests such as the spruce bark beetle.
Yes, the tree composition of the forest will change over the next century as trees such as hornbeam take advantage of the gaps left by spruce, but that is nature in action.
The dispute has gone as high as the European Court of Justice (the forest is a Natura 2000 area) and the court ruled in the environmentalists’ favour. The ruling has been accepted, but the row rumbles on in Poland’s highly polarised political arena, a significant section of which is hostile to EU institutions.
More broadly the controversy highlights the degree to which our concept of an attractive forest is a cultural construct, imagined very differently by different sectors of society.
For many, woodlands are green, well-ordered places, where all the trees are living and in good condition (or neatly harvested). But Białowieźa, and especially its strict reserve, is a very untidy place by these standards, and as often brown or red as green, since trees die, fall, and very slowly return to the forest floor where they stood while living, in a spectrum of darker shades.
Could we hope for an Irish public to one day be so tolerant of wild animals?
— Pádraic Fogarty
In letting dead wood remain in place, the biodiversity of the forest soars. A dead tree will host hundreds more species of small creatures, from insects to reptiles, than a living one.
These feed a very large number and diversity of, for example, woodpeckers, providing in turn more food for owls and other forest raptors, and so on. That is not to mention the immense richness and density of the fungal life in a truly old-growth forest, where every second tree, and much of the understory, blossoms with fairytale mushroom life.
The dead wood, in its early stages, also provides plenty of accessible nesting sites for birds. Furthermore, as it falls it alters the structure of the forest floor, with a cascade of ecological consequences.
Deer, for example, will tend to avoid lying logs that may provide cover for wolves or lynxes. This saves these areas from grazing, so that seedling trees have a much better chance of survival among their decaying ancestors.
Other processes also flourish much more richly in an unmanaged woodland than in industrial plantations. Beavers, for example, those ecological entrepreneurs par excellence, can and do transform small river channels into broad willow and alder marshes with their dams, opening up areas of the forest to the light that can barely penetrate elsewhere.
There is an extraordinary frisson in making the transition, even within the relative “wildness” of the national park areas of Białowieźa, to the great central cathedral of the strict reserve.
While the immediate temptation is to wander freely in this Edenic wonderland, the restriction on leaving the sole public path, which only traverses a small section of the reserve, makes sense. In this one place we can see before our eyes how the world must have looked to our hunter-gather ancestors in the heart of Europe.
[ Poland’s prime and primeval forestOpens in new window ]
There is a conflict, as our host on this trip, Tom Diserens, says, between a management policy based on the protection of an individual species, like the Norway spruce, and one dedicated to the health of an entire ecosystem. Białowieźa still offers a unique opportunity to test how the latter option works.
On the same trip with me is Pádraic Fogarty, an environmental activist and contributor to these pages. On the return home, he gives his impressions:
“Standing in the strict reserve part of the forest, with the towering oak and ash trees, knowing that not far there were wolves, lynx, wild boar, bears and red deer, it was hard not to wonder: is this what Ireland once looked like?
“We’re told so often that nature needs human guidance and constant management, but here nature has thrived, if not exactly untouched, certainly with relatively little interference, for thousands of years. This convinced me that if we are to expand our natural forests in Ireland, nature will do most of the work. Granted it will need a helping hand but we should be far more relaxed about natural processes like letting trees get old, die and rot where they fall, as well as letting the trees and the animals do the planting for us.
“I was struck with how laid-back Polish people are about sharing their country with thousands of wolves – we were told that levels of conflict are very low – while releasing lynx into new parts of that country is barely newsworthy. Could we hope for an Irish public to one day be so tolerant of wild animals?
“I was struck with a sense of awe at being somewhere that is so much older than everything around us today like towns, cities and farms, and I get this feeling when in I visit the remnants of Atlantic rainforest in Ireland. I feel very inspired after seeing the Białowieża forest and feel more than ever that restoring our Irish forest would be the most magnificent thing.”
Leaving the strict reserve, we cross an open meadow. Through the mist, a single dark shape ambles into view. It is a young male bison, with a limp in one leg. It is one of a good number we have seen, but this is our most intimate encounter with the species. It approaches us slowly, giving us time to bunch up to let it pass behind us and vanish into obscurity. One can’t help wondering if we are looking at the past, or into the future.
