Trip reports

Germany & Poland, August-September 2010

Jeremy Barker

The Odertal

We flew in to Berlin from Heathrow, then took a bus to the Hauptbahnhof and a train to Angermuende, where we were collected. We stayed at a very pleasant bed & breakfast in the village of Criewen (Pension Storchennest), where we had a clean, cosy and reasonably-priced double room. All well and good... in fact, the owners not only picked us up from the station, but they also produced a couple of bottles of beer to help us settle in for the first night - which were drunk in the back garden, with accompaniment from a variety of green frogs and a hedgehog floor-show.

For the next week I was kept busy exploring the various paths and tracks around the floodplain and forest fringe, whilst Na dropped by when she wasn't working with the park staff. The weather wasn't anything to write home about, but the wildlife was pretty good. A particularly poor summer in this part of Europe meant that there were spring/summer floods, which wiped out most of the birds' nests in the park - a similar story in Biebrza as well - so that many of the larger wetland birds had already moved on south: ducks, terns and waders all in very short supply. The flora was also pretty late, which meant we saw more than we might have, and the invertebrates were also perhaps not quite as expected - though the dragonfly populations didn't seem to be doing so badly! Some gain, some lose, I guess.

Yes, my friends, onwards and eastwards! We were woken bright and bleary by our landlady hammering on the door at some ungodly hour of the morning. Not being religious, this mattered not, so we sprang out of bed, grabbed our bags and waited patiently by the car to catch a lift to the station at Schwedt. Following a short drive, we sat patiently on the platform and watched the train pass by into town. As it returned to Angermuende it paused again, we hopped on, and our journey east to countries new began... Shockingly, the train was 5 minutes late getting in to the station, so our 7-minute comfortable changeover became a 2-minute mad dash under the lines and along the full length of the station to the next train. An hour and a half later we were left in Szczecin station, where the challenge of crossing Poland by train became apparent: there appeared to be no information to tell us which platform the train to Warsaw would go from... None of those little electronic boards above the platforms, not even a clicky board where the letters and numbers all roll over one another like a one-armed bandit with loads of potential combinations. We eventually found a paper notice with the day's trains printed on it, which seemed to suggest that platform 4 was the one to be on. Dilemma two: platform 4 was actually two platforms. Cunningly, the platform was also divided into four 'tors', for which we could divine no purpose. We finally found the correct train by watching the labels on the doors as they went past - this one was also late.

We ground into Warsaw and repeated the whole tedious process of finding the correct platform, and boarded another tardy train, then fell out of the carriage in Bialystock, bought some restorative coca-cola and a hot dog, and boarded the final train of the journey. This one departed on time, but we did have some unexplained pauses on the journey whilst various members of staff stamped up and down the length of the train at high speed, frowning. Everyone else (driver included) seemed as baffled as we were, and to be honest, we were grateful when we finally jumped ship at Osowiec, where we settled in to a rather comfy room in Biebrza National Park headquarters...

The next morning was a cracker: clear, cold and with a fresh NW wind. Migrant birds were passing over - we could hear Yellow Wagtail and Tree Pipit from the comfort of our bed - and so we leapt up, finished the food we had left, and headed out for some exploring. The trees around the little village were dripping with Chiffchaffs and Spotted Flycatchers, with a generous sprinkling of Pied Flycatchers. A couple of Wood Warblers appeared to add some sparkle, and we wandered slowly on towards the open marshes and fields. As the landscape opened out, different birds appeared: the bushes by the road were hopping with Lesser Whitethroats and Blackcaps, whilst the fields were scattered with Whinchats: all in all, a sight to delight any birder who's based in the southwest of England! All the while, Yellow Wagtails and Tree Pipits passed by overhead, joined by a single Black Stork, then a single White Stork to make things even.

After pottering back to HQ to pick up rented bicycles, we headed back out along the Fort II boardwalk, where a young male Elk was the surprise find of the day, then out through Osowiec village to a wet woodland we'd noticed on the maps. This was again dripping with birds: the same mix as earlier, but with a couple of added bonus species thrown in for good measure: a single Hobby and a couple of Honey-buzzards overhead, and Redstart, Cuckoo, Golden Oriole and adult Red-breasted Flycatcher at eye-level.

The journey back via Goniadz rounded the day off with a tranquil view across the marshes, with a handful of Black Terns hawking the river in front of us.

The morning of August 30th was spent wandering along the Tsar Road, through a patch of former peat-cutting, which had been recommended to us by Urszula. This turned out to be a fabulous area, with a canopy of pine and Silver Birch over a shrub layer of the highly aromatic Labrador Tea (either Ledum palustre or L. groenlandicum) and heathers, interspersed with a myriad of dark peaty pools, many choked with a rich variety of Sphagnum mosses and Hare's-tail Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum). The whole area must be heaving with interesting dragon- and damselflies in season, but we were left with a smattering of resident birds and an abundance of green frog species (maybe Pool Frog Rana lessonae).

Whilst Na gave her presentation to the park staff, I wandered back to the boardwalk at Fort II, where I was rather stunned to see a Little Crake and a Spotted Crake loafing together below a willow, right next to one of the observation platforms. The Little Crake even had the decency to hang around until Na rejoined me - her second new bird species of the trip...

We were then offered a boat trip down the river, and a visit to the mineral islands in the middle of the marsh. We met up and headed out early enough for the river mists to be nicely romantic, past a couple of feral Alsatians and down to the islands. At this point, disaster struck, when I lost my footing in the depths and submerged myself and my camera. That rather put paid to any further photos on the trip, so anything after this is likely to be courtesy of Na. The rest of the day was rather uneventful by comparison, and the wind began to pick up - an ominous precursor of things to come! Urszula kindly showed us around her home town of Suwalki - the last town in Poland - and we had our first chance to taste proper Polish cooking; as well as some awesome Polish hospitality!

The first day of September opened with teeming, steaming, tipping rain. We were back at the park in time to meet up with Christoph, one of the two onithologists employed by the park and head into the Alder carr forest. For a Brit, this was a humbling experience. Wet Alder woodland in this country is usually a minor corner of a fenny area, perhaps a couple of hectares in extent if you're lucky, and often consists of a tangled patch of scrubby trees over a bit of Yellow Flag iris (perhaps I exaggerate, but the point is that our Alder wet woodland is small in extent). This was a single block of 1,000 (count 'em) hectares of wet Alder woodland of a quality to awe. Despite the rain, despite the fact that we were ploughing through water up to our thighs, despite the cold, it was probably the single most memorable day of the trip. Walking into a patch of wet woodland for an hour and a half, following a GPS track to find our way to our goal - the trifling matter of checking a White-tailed Eagle's nest - the sheer scale of the place was phenomenal. The icing on the cake was a female White-backed Woodpecker which posed about 50m away from us for a short while, before disappearing again into the depths of the woodland.

Our journey home was broken with a short stop to admire the minor area of sedge swamp where the bulk of the park's Aquatic Warblers breed: a mere 5,000 hectare extent, which was in the process of being mown by several enormous tracked tractors, throwing up clouds of spray as they churned their way across the marsh.

We spent our final day in the Red Bog protected area, jamming in on feeding time for the rehabilitated Elk, Wild Boar and Wolf, and then learning a little about the structure, ecology and management of the bog and the acid grassland and woodland around it. A distant blob seemed to be another Elk - confirmed when it later disappeared when we took our eyes off it - but the day was oddly quiet. After the first day, the flush of migrant birds had really petered out, and the weather was cold enough that most of the invertebrates had been knocked on the head. The plants were pretty much over as well - we saw the leaves of Eastern Pasqueflower (Pulsatilla patens) whilst we searched for Thesium ebracteatum (which either has no common name, or rejoices in the name of Bastard Toadflax - I haven't yet worked out which), but September is really time to pack it in for much of the non-birdy interest. So we duly packed it in, headed back to Warsaw (both trains were on time - what are they trying to tell us?) and the airport, then off to Cologne, Na's parents and a party and a half to celebrate their Ruby wedding anniversary.