Back in Lobau national park. It's just trees - but!
For a change the picture actually was taken today (while I was a bit lazy the last days and mostly showed photos from my archives), the weather being perfect for biking: rather cool but not cold, sky overcast, hardly any drizzle. Everything one could wish for.
You may notice the two yellow posts in the background, on either side of the path, and you may ask yourself whoever might cut down wood in a national park.
As for the posts, the national park management is completing its work on a canal to supply the lower parts of Lobau with more water as the ground water in this region was lower than it should have been in the last years: the Lobau swamplands were beginning to dry up. And the two posts mark the beginnings of this work.
As for the cut wood: in this case this was necessary to make way for the canal, but this may happen elsewhere, too, for other reasons. The Lobau region is not totally uncultivated, the Lobau management employs foresters and farmers to maintain the 'natural' condition which in some cases is cultivated land which will involve regularly ploughing the fields and harvesting hay, and sometimes even cutting down wood.
Even some of the (in theory) 'uncultivated' lands as the 'hot lands' (German Heisslände, I did already show them in this blog several times) need some sort of cultivation from time to time, otherwise nature would turn them into woodlands within two decades: so they let graze sheep on the hot lands from time to time to keep the saplings down.
Only some parts of Lobau are 'really' wild and mostly untouched by humankind; but even there foresters feed the deer. And my guess would be that they even hunt down the surplus of deer - although I am not sure of this. It stands to reason, as there are no wolves any more and therefore nature has no means of keeping down the population.
