Bialowieza National Park

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Reached Bialystok (northern Poland) late at night and managed to somehow find my hostel in a creepy ghetto type part of town. The town itself was nothing at all special, just a unfriendly concrete town with a few shops and churches. Caught another bus in the morning to my destination: Bialowieza National Park - which is in the north east of Poland a few kilometres from the Belarus border. This was a really amazing town with the one main street containing a couple of shops, a cinerma, pizza joint and library. The town had only a few hundred people who lived in these amazing woodern houses with the old women wrapped up in head scarfs etc and the main form of transport was the bike. Even in a town this small there were a few local drunks - go the home of vodka. I ended up living in one of the University buildings, at the geobotanical site with a couple of other Polish girls. The Bialowieza Institute was an amazing place and there I meet many great people all working on various projects in the reserve from Bison, Ferrets, mice to lynx and wolves etc. I worked with the ungulate team tracking deer (red and roe) and wild boar along side Thomaz, Leif, and Damien. The week days consisted of biking around the reserve radio tracking various animals, sometimes doing this for 24hrs, and also various other tasks from biomass sampling and quadrat poo counting. It is an amazing forest containing some of the last remaining primeval forest left in Europe and with many species of animals from bison, lynx, badgers, beavers, wolves, foxes, squirrels, snakes, woodpeckers, deer and boar etc found here. Each day we would come across amazing sights from huge families of boar, wolf packs, roaring red deer to crazy things like border guards and sights where old bombs were exploded with very little warning. We managed to loose a few boar to illegal hunters and wolves. A group of about 10 of us students got on really well and evenings would be spent having drunken bbqs containing too many vodka shots or out listening to the roaring deer and wolves and spot the bats etc. In the weekends we had free time and the group of us would head out on trips from bush walks, to the local zoo, birdwatching and even moose spotting, heading into the main cities, plus more bbqs and video and pancake nights, and mushroom picking. The towns nearby were amazing and often contained about 20 odd cute little houses with all the old folks sitting out beside the road side watching us drive through - not too friendly. I was one of only 3 in the town whose native language was English and we had some good fun trying to communicate. After almost 2 months, just as the cool autumn weather began to hit the area It was time I left as funds were running low. Caught a lift to Warsaw.

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