POLAND: 8-27 June 2017
This three weeks travel was limited to two regions :
- Bialowieza: one of the last primary forests of Europe, between Poland and Belarus.
- Eastern Carpates : Bieszczady National Park. Carpates, which cover eight countries, constitute one of the best preserved mountain ranges of Europe.
Our target species were the big predators, that didn’t show up and the bisons, that delighted us ! The still very wild nature in Poland offers every day extraordinary plant and animal observations.
We moved by train for long distances, by taxi for occasional round trips and daily by foot and bike. In Bialowieza region, we radiated by bike from a little isolated house at the edge of a pond near the village of Narewska. http://agro.fajnewczasy.com/kontakt.html Wonderful place where the evenings were embellished with songs of European nightjars and woodkock displays when Yellow-bellied toad left them a little sound space…
In Eastern Carpates we were based at Muczne, in "Willa Arnika" guest house http://www.willaarnika.pl/ This village is situated in Bieszczady National Park, near Ukraine. A young male of brown bear has been seen nearly every evening of our stay in MUczne…we missed it…However, several Ural owl families let themselves be observed very closely and this nearly every day!
The landscapes around San river that marks out the border between Poland and Ukraine deserve a special mention: gigantic wet meadows sheltering high densities of Corncrake, Western Europe’s kind of shattered natural environment. San river is completely natural, without any human activities.
