Peter's Europe Blog: ELF Conservation Holiday, 31.8 → 9.9: The work

For at least the last 1000 years, much of the land in the west of Estonia has been used for agriculture. This has maintained open pastures throughout the region, creating a unique and highly biologically diverse landscape. This type of semi-natural landscape is called an alvar. The extent of alvars directly correlates to the shallow limestone bedrock of the region. This limestone makes the soils alkaline.

Indeed, we visited one alvar which holds the record of second-most biologically diverse area in the world, second only to one place in Argentina (admittedly I don’t know the criteria used to make this claim, but still, pretty impressive right?). During the soviet occupation and in subsequent years, landuse practices changed drastically as people with their ancient knowledge left the land. When the land is not continuously mown or grazed, other colonizing species move in.

In both locations, the main focus of the work was the clearing/thinning of juniper trees (whose berries are used to male gin), the most prominent colonising species, along with pine trees. Junipers and pines both make soils acid. Thus, once established in large numbers, these species drastically alter the regions soils and thus biodiversity. Opening the landscape allows the alvars to re-establish. Once the land has been cleared, it is grazed to prevent the junipers and other trees from re-establishing.

In both locations, chainsaws were used to remove the bulk of the trees, with hand tools such as loppers and scythes used to tidy up. Most of the rubbish was burnt off. At Pivarootsi this was done on one large fire with a tractor used to move the material while on Vormsi we made smaller piles to burn when it was safe.

On Vormsi, I was able to use a petrol chainsaw for the first time. I was shown how to fell pine trees and had a ball cutting thorough the junipers and pines. It was very satisfying in a primeval sort of way.

The weather was okay for the most part, however, there was one particularly rainy period while at Pivarootsi when we decided it was too wet to work outside. Instead, the farmer enlisted the guys (+1 girl) to move a huge pile of old wooden beams out of a shed. This turned out to be a particularly filthy job and I’ve only just (Tallinn 13.9) managed to clean all the dirt off my rain jacket.

It must be said, however, that the work was very good and it never felt as though there were unrealistic expectations or that we were being pushed too hard. I think everyone, with their varying skills and abilities, felt included and valued.