Willow pollards at the river

Pollarded willow trees are a feature of cultural landscapes, especially of traditional used pastures and open, riverside grasslands. Sometimes they are described as mystical elements of foggy landscapes,somewhere between earth and water. In fact their old trunks, made of bark, hollows, dead and living wood, are valuable wildlife habitats. They form niches for bats and hole-nesting birds, fungi and insects, above allother representatives of biodiversity. Pollards crowns, round in form, expanded in diameter, and often oddly formed when they are getting old, additionally provide shelters and nesting sites for birds like geese or the white stork.

Pollard trunks are cut regularly at 2-3m height in an interval of 1-15 years. Regenerated top shoots once were used for baskets, animal fodder and firewood. With the declining of traditional land use forms, many willow pollards became neglected, vulnerable to wind damage and often broken down or apart.

A local nature conservation group in Lower Austria recently took action by resuming pollard management in the floodplain area “Rabensburger Thaya-Auen”, a Green Belt nature reserve along the river Thaya (Dyje). The project is accompanied by biologists, who counted and evaluated the trees first and furthermore investigated the status of avifauna and flora of this unique area. Pollarding operations, of course, are exhausting and dangerous, especially on old neglected trees. So both, craft and experience, are needed to meet the challenges of maintaining biodiversity and to rejuvenate our peculiar willow pollards at European rivers.

The floodplain is part of the Ramsar-site “Donau-March-Auen” and situated near the border triangle between Austria, Slovakia and Moravia (Czech republic). Now also local farmers support the conservation activities by providing trees for management and by taking action on their own ground.