A walk through the Drents-Friese Wold National Park is no punishment on a sunny day. But as a bird lover I find it alarmingly quiet. I don’t even see a great tit in the forest, not a meadow pipit on the heath, not a coot in the fen. Nothing.
The wind is also quiet. The silence is only broken by cyclists, runners, walkers, dogs. However, the crowds are not too bad, it is a weekday morning, minutes pass without company, in an hour I meet thirteen people. On Sunday afternoons I only walk if I am forced to.
The disadvantage of a weekday, however, is that it is mowed and chopped. I often thought: bad luck, that they are racing through the woods here and now with their gigantic machines. I now know that there is little chance that machines will not be used in a nature reserve. Cut, thin, harvest, rejuvenate; give it a name. Chopping wood is sometimes even referred to as ‘forest restoration’.
Pipe straw does well under a blanket of nitrogen
Still, I like the walk. It freezes in the shade and the air tickles my cheeks. They warm up in the sun. The sunlight shines along the forest edge of birch, spruce, pine and larch. A beautiful decor around the heath completely overgrown with pipe straw.
Pipe straw is so called because those long thin Gouda pipe stems from bygone centuries were modeled around a long blade of this grass before they went into the oven. During baking the straw scorched away and the pipe stem got a smoke channel. Pipe straw does well under a blanket of nitrogen, which is why all heaths turn into grass fields, unless they are soded with, of course, noisy machines.
Pipe straw forms sturdy clumps that you can trip over, but can also sit on with a dry bottom. I do that when I eat my sandwiches, while spying around. Geese fly high and a buzzard. Still some birds!
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.