Bialowieza in Poland

This July 2011 video is called Białowieża National Park (Poland).

As the earlier blog entry said, on 16 April we arrived near Bialowieza national park in eastern Poland.

In Bialowieza village, house sparrows and a singing song thrush.

The entrance to the national park is marked by a wooden bridge. On that bridge, two nuthatches (the somewhat paler East European form).

This is a great reed warbler video.

In the reedbeds on the edges of the ponds, many great reed warblers, singing. House martins flying around. From bushes, a thrush nightingale, singing.

This part of the national park is called Palace park. In earlier centuries, here were the buildings from which princes hunted European bison and other animals in Bialowieza forest. In 1731, King Augustus II of Poland erected an obelisk style monument, recording the names of courtiers who had participated in the hunting and the animals which had been killed. The monument is still there today.

That cannot be said of the big palace which the czars of Russia had built here in the late nineteenth century. In the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, the monarchs of Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided Poland among themselves. Bialowieza became part of the Russian empire. Polish foresters and other inhabitants of Bialowieza participated in nineteenth century anti czarist uprisings. The czar’s government had them deported to Siberia. The empire brought Russian foresters to Bialowieza in order to still have imperial hunts there. Today, about 2,000 people live in Bialowieza village, 3,000 live in the total region. The Polish autocephalous orthodox church is the biggest religious denomination, while in most of Poland it is the Roman Catholic church.

After Poland became independent after the First World War, the Polish government used the former czar’s palace to receive foreign guests on hunting visits, including Hermann Goering of nazi Germany, and Count Ciano, foreign secretary of Mussolini’s Italy. After the 1939 German occupation, Hitler’s army used the palace as military headquarters. When they had to retreat in 1944, they completely destroyed the building. Other, smaller, buildings are still standing.

In a tree near one of those buildings, today a nature education center, a collared flycatcher.

This is a video of a collared flycatcher in Sweden.

A chaffinch singing. Chiffchaff sound.

Pied wagtail. Robin.

On the edge of a sandbox, a greenfinch sits, eating dandelion seeds. Next to it sits a goldfinch.

As we go back to the village, a big white stork nest on a roof. One of many in Poland.

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• Huge chocolate white eagle marks Poland’s holiday (sacbee.com)