The Harz dead! Long live the Harz!

A third of Germany’s landmass is covered in woodland, and forests play an important role in the country’s national folklore, from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm to the poems of Goethe. But a combination of storms, drought, forest fires and aggressively spreading bark beetle plagues have destroyed swathes of German forest equivalent to more than 250,000 football fields. The culprit has been the tiny bark beetle, which has gone on a rampage as trees in water-starved habitats have lost their natural defences. In vast parts of Germany, including the Harz, once healthy trees have become defoliated skeletons, their trunks marked by tell-tale networks of tiny tunnels.

The culprit - a bark beatle

The Oberharz today

The insect eats the bark and lays eggs inside and then larvae start to eat the trunk and block the nutrient pathways of the tree, which dies in about four weeks. This is the worst crisis to hit German forests since the acid rain saga in the 1980s which was caused by wind and rain borne industrial pollution. This time, however, climate change is probably providing the beetles with optimum conditions in which to survive the previously harsh winters and to breed multiple times. The Harz was already an economically distressed region, but this latest affliction not only affects tourism - who wants to walk in a dead forest, but the forestry industry itself which, amazingly, employs over a million people - more than the automotive industry.

Dead Spruce trees - Oberharz

A depressing overview of the Harz looking south from the Brocken

But every cloud has a silver lining, even though its fairly hard to see it here, because this process has accelerated the demise of a depressing mono-cultural landscape planted after the second world war, and the re-birth, assisted by man, of a more natural forest landscape of mixed forest as we see already in the eastern part of the Harz. Serendipitously, this process is also good for wildlife as the proliferation of dead wood and sun-lit space has actually increased the range of bird species found here.  I should also mention the good work that has been done in reintroducing Lynx and Wildcats - amazingly I saw one of the latter once standing on the side of the road.

Tengmalm's Owl nesting in a dead tree

Nature as a natural building site

Looking for birds in the Harz has always been hard work, but even I'm tempted to go looking for Pygmy and Tengmalm’s Owls and other species quietly recolonising this region. To be honest, the Harz needs some love. As a landscape it is merely a shadow of what it once must have been. Mountain streams and rivers are either dammed or canalised to prevent downstream flooding, the forest is, in the west at least, mono-cultural pine and dying, climate change has warned the weather for the worse - there's now very little snow, and the villages and towns are dilapidated and depopulating fast.  If ever there was a region that would benefit from sensitive re-wilding, this is it.