Parks And Reserves, Bialowieza Forest

“Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the Bialowieza Forest is Europe's last lowland old-growth forest, parts of which have never been cut by man. The entire forest covers about 140,000 hectares, or around 15 percent the size of Yellowstone National Park. Here, trees are king: growing over 40 meters (over 130 feet) tall, some were saplings when Christopher Columbus was born....The forest is home to wolves, lynx, boar, elk, red deer, roe deer, and its most iconic animal, the European bison (Bison bonasus). This species, the biggest land mammal in Europe, went extinct in the wild in the 1920s, but has since made a remarkable come-back.” Although listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, together with the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park on the Belarus side, “only 17% of the Polish area of the forest is protected as a national park.” The greatest threat it faces today is logging around the edges of the old-growth forest.