You've probably never heard of "Bialowie Zap Paszha".However, if you grew up in a temperate zone - the so-called temperate zone includes most of North America, Japan, Korea, Russia, the surrounding areas of the former Soviet republics, parts of China, Turkey, Eastern Europe and including the British Isles Western Europe within - then you must have an impression of it in the back of your mind.If you were born in the tundra, desert, subtropics, tropics, pampas, or savannah, those parallels to "Pasza" are sure to jog your memory too. "Pasza" comes from old Polish and means "virgin forest".Bialowieza Primeval Forest covers an area of ​​about 500,000 acres, straddling Poland and Belarus. It is the only remaining wild lowland in the European continent, and it is very old.When you were a child and someone read Grimm's fairy tales to you, think about it, isn't that foggy forest looming in front of your eyes?Here, towering ash and linden trees reach almost 150 feet, their massive canopies sheltering a soggy ground cover of hornbeams, ferns, wetland alder and bowl fungi.The mossy oaks, more than 500 years old, are so big that the great spotted woodpecker hides the spruce bulbs in the folds of their bark.The air is dense and clear, and there is silence everywhere. Occasionally, the hoarse rattle of a starjay, the low howl of a pygmy owl, or a howl of a wolf will break the silence, and then return to calm again.

In the forest, the leaf cover deposited over the ages exudes a faint fragrance, as if listening to the development of seeds.In the primeval forest of Bialowieza, the luxuriant and lush life should be grateful to the Luohong that has turned into spring mud.Nearly a quarter of all above-ground organic communities grow in various types of decay—more than fifty cubic yards per acre of rotting tree trunks and fallen branches that feed thousands of species of mushrooms, mosses, bark beetles Nutrients provide nutrients, insect larvae and microbes that are nowhere to be found in other man-managed forests.

These creatures in turn provide abundant food for weasels, pine martens, raccoons, badgers, otters, foxes, bobcats, wolves, roe deer, elk, and eagles.There is more variety of life here than anywhere else on the Continent—however, with neither mountains nor sheltered valleys surrounding the forest, there are no unique environmental requirements for the survival of endemic species.The Bialowieza Primeval Forest is just a remnant of an ancient forest that once stretched east to Siberia and west to Ireland. Such a well-established biological site deserves the supreme privilege in Europe.In the 14th century, a Lithuanian duke named Wladyslaw II Jagiello successfully allyed his Grand Duchy with the Kingdom of Poland, after which he declared the forest a royal hunting ground.It has been so for centuries.When the Polish-Lithuanian Union was finally incorporated into the territory of Russia, the Bialowieza Primeval Forest became the exclusive domain of the Tsar.During the First World War, the Germans cut down trees and slaughtered people wantonly when they marched. Despite this, a major part of the original forest survived and became a Polish national park in 1921.Under the rule of the Soviet Union, deforestation once made a comeback. However, during the Nazi invasion, a marshal named Hermann Göring ordered the entire forest to be restricted because of his love for nature. Of course, he can still enter if he is happy. of.

After World War II, legend has it that one drunken night in Warsaw, Joseph Stalin agreed to hand over two-fifths of the forest to Poland.The communist rule has brought little change to the forest, other than the construction of hunting lodges for some high-ranking people. In 1991, in one of the dachas, Viskuri, the Soviet Union signed an agreement to disintegrate.However, it turns out that this ancient sanctuary is more threatened by Polish democracy and Belarusian independence than seven centuries of dictatorship and dictatorship.The forestry departments of the two countries have advocated strengthening management to maintain the ecological health of the Bialowieża virgin forest.However, this "management" is nothing more than a cover for collecting and selling mature hardwoods.If it is not for "management", these hardwoods will one day scatter their fruits with the wind and return nutrition to the forest.

* It is secretly surprising to think that Europe was once like this virgin forest.Entering such a forest, we realize that we are nothing more than nature's magical creations.Looking at the seven-foot-wide trunks of older trees and walking among the tallest trees—giant Norway spruces weathered as weathered as Methuselah 1—is a great choice for the lower For someone who grew up in the secondary woodlands of the United States, this place should be as stunning as the Amazon Basin or Antarctica.However, what makes people wonder is that as soon as people step into this forest, the feeling of familiarity and intimacy arises spontaneously.Even a tiny creature can be so perfect.

Andrei Babek recognized it immediately.As a forestry student in Krakow 2, he was trained in how to keep the forest at its maximum productivity, part of which was the elimination of "excess" organic litter to prevent insects such as bark beetles from infesting the forest .But here, he was dumbfounded, because the number and types of creatures here were ten times more than any forest he had ever seen. This is the only place where all nine species of European woodpecker live.He then realized that some woodpecker species lived only in hollow, dying trees. "They can't survive in managed forests," he told his forestry professor. "The Bialowieza Primeval Forest has not relied on human management for thousands of years, and it has survived quite well."

The husky, bearded young Polish forester turned forest ecologist.Polish National Parks once employed him.He later lost his job for opposing a "management plan" to log logs into the heart of the virgin forest.In several international journals, he severely criticized the official assertion that "the forest will die without our thoughtful help" and criticized the "righteous behavior" of cutting down trees around the Bialowieza virgin forest to "reshape the original flavor of the forest" ".He charges that this inexplicable way of thinking is common among Europeans who have little idea of ​​forest wilderness.

In order for the forest in his memory to never disappear, he put on leather boots for several years and walked in the virgin forest he loves so much.Although Andrei Babek did his best to keep the untouched areas of the forest, he couldn't resist his human nature and wanted to see what happened. Alone in the forest, Babick travels through time and space to converse with the people who have been here before.Such a pure wilderness is like a blank slate recording human footprints.He had been specially trained to know how to read these records.Charcoal in the soil suggests that hunters once burned parts of the forest and then grazed them.Towering birches and rustling aspens testify to the fact that Jagiello's descendants may have been distracted from hunting by war; as time passed, these sun-seeking species took root again in the once-burnt land.In the shade, the hardwood saplings reveal the secrets of the forest's endless reproduction.Gradually, they will grow into lush birches and aspens, as if they never disappeared here.

Whenever Babick came across an oddly shaped shrub that looked like a hawthorn or an old apple tree, he knew it was the remains of a log cabin long ago devoured by the microbes that transformed the forest's supertrees for the soil.He also knew that any tall, solitary oak growing out of a low clover bush meant a crematorium.Their roots draw nourishment from the ashes of earlier Slavic corpses.These Slavs are the current Belarusians, and they came from the East nine hundred years ago.On the northwestern border of the forest, Jews from the five surrounding villages bury their dead here.Their sandstone and granite headstones, dating from the 1850s, have splintered, moss-covered bases that have become smooth as pebbles left by loved ones who have come to mourn.Of course, these relatives have already passed away.

Andrei Babek walked across a green meadow with a Scotch pine tree, not even a mile to the Belarusian border.The October afternoon was so still that he could hear the snowflakes falling.Suddenly, there was a crisp sound in the grass, and more than a dozen European bison rushed out from the place enjoying the tender grass.Breathing heat, pawing at the dirt with their hooves, they stared long and hard at the seemingly fragile biped with their large, black eyes, before they reacted like their ancestors and fled. There are only six hundred European bison left in the wild, and almost all of them are concentrated here—or maybe half, depending on how we define "here."In the 1980s, a steel curtain erected by the Soviets along the border bisected this paradise, designed to keep out defectors who fell to Poland's Solidarity movement.Although wolves burrow underground, and roe deer and elk are thought to be able to cross the barrier, the largest population of mammals in Europe has been artificially divided, and some zoologists worry that the population's genetics will be fragmented, leading to extinction .After World War I, zoo-raised bison were brought into the forest to replenish the species, which had been all but eaten up by starving soldiers.And now, the offspring of the Cold War once again threaten their existence.

Belarus removed the statue of Lenin after the collapse of communism, but has no intention of dismantling the barrier, especially since forests in Poland are now part of the European Union.Although the section separating the two public parks is only 14 kilometers long, if you want to visit Białowieża Forest as a tourist, you have to drive 100 miles south and cross the border by train to Bure ster 3, undergo questioning beyond doubt, then hire a car and drive north.Andrei Babek's classmate in Belarus, Hooli Kazuka, is an activist. He has a bad complexion and a thin, yellow complexion. He is a biologist who studies invertebrates and once served as the deputy director of the virgin forest in Belarus.He was fired from his state's park service for speaking out against a sawmill recently built by the park.Living in a Brezhnev-era house on the edge of the forest, he serves visitors respectful tea and talks about his dream of an internationally peaceful park where bison and moose roam freely Walk freely and grow. Here, the tall trees in the primeval forest are exactly the same as those in Poland; the same buttercups, moss, and huge red leaves of oak trees;In fact, in Poland and Belarus, forests are still expanding as agricultural populations migrate from shrinking countryside to cities.In this humid climate, birches and aspens rapidly invade the surrounding fallow potato-growing areas; in just two decades farmland becomes woodland.Oaks, maples, lindens, elms, and spruces also flourished in their shade.If humans can disappear for 500 years, a real forest will be resurrected here. The idea that Europe's suburbs could one day be restored to pristine forests is exciting.However, the last humans must remember to remove the steel curtain in Belarus, otherwise, the European bison here will perish with them.