Britain’s Prince Charles to visit bison-filled virgin forest in eastern Poland

Prince Charles to visit bison-filled Polish forest

WARSAW, Poland — Britain’s Prince Charles visits Poland on Monday, a journey that includes a visit to a bison-filled woodland — Europe’s last remaining primeval forest thanks to preservation efforts of kings and czars of centuries past.

The British Embassy in Warsaw said the environmentally minded prince, along with his wife, Camilla, will visit a bison reserve where they will be guaranteed a view of several of the hefty beasts that are Europe’s largest land mammals and less-hirsute cousins of the North American buffalo.

They will then go to a feeding point where they may — or may not — see some of the imposing animals wandering freely.

During the warmer months, the bison feed on grass and other vegetation, living in the wild and avoiding human settlements. But during the winter they are dependent on supplemental feeding stations that help them survive and keep them from ravaging farmlands.

Rafal Kowalczyk, a mammal ecologist who studies the bison, many of whom he has fitted with GPS collars to track their movement, calls the animals “ghosts of the forest.”

“When you catch a sight of their horns in the distance in summer it is like magic,” he said. But the winter is another matter: “they become like lazy cows.”

Charles and Camilla begin their three-day visit Monday, when they dine with President Lech Kaczynski and meet Prime Minister Donald Tusk. On Tuesday, they will travel 125 miles (200 kilometers) east to the Bialowieza Forest, an immense virgin forest that straddles Poland and Belarus. It is also home to wolves, lynx and otters, along with storks that circle above.

Yet travelers come from far and wide mainly to see the bison, an animal that lived across much of Europe until 10,000 years ago but whose habitat shrank dramatically with deforestation and the spread of towns and cities across Europe in recent centuries.

“The bison is like a relic of past times,” said Kowalczyk, with the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

There are more than 800 in the forest, with 450 on the Polish side, together making up the world’s largest free-living population of European bison.

Poland’s 15th-century kings recognized the importance of the forest, which they valued for the presence of the bison they loved to hunt. They forbade settlements in the forest and banned the cutting of trees and hunting by others. At one point the penalty for killing one bison was the forfeiture of 30 cows, Kowalczyk said.

In the 19th century, the area came under Russian control and the czars came to value the place and made it their private property. During World War I, the bison were nearly wiped out when hungry German soldiers and residents hunted them for their meat.

Bison slowly returned in the 1920s with some zoo animals used to restart the population. The result is extremely limited genetic variety in the Bialowieza population, a problem further hampered by the heavily fortified border between EU member Poland and autocratic Belarus.

The border prevents migration and reproduction between bison on each side of what some call Europe’s new Iron Curtain.

Charles will meet Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski to discuss the preservation of crumbling palaces in Poland.

Charles and Camilla finish their Polish visit Wednesday, meeting with soldiers bound for Afghanistan before continuing on to Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Associated Press writer Monika Scislowska contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that more than 800 bison live in entire forest, not just Polish national park.)