“The rock I am standing on is old. Two billion years to be precise.” Per-Arne Olsson likes to put things in perspective to captivate our listening ears. We are in Blekinge, literally translated as calm water, Sweden’s second smallest province. We are walking part of the Blekingeleden, a long-distance trail (240 km) that borders the Skåneleden (1000 km). We pass a group of cream white cows, cooling themselves in the Baltic Sea. The kayaks await at the end of our trail. The sea is very calm, so we don’t need a spray skirt today. After briefly testing the foot pedals, putting my phone in the dry-bag and pushing myself into the water, shaking and bumping, I feel water underneath me, and my world starts to wobble. Not much later, I paddle all alone over a sea that was once frozen. What to do? Do I go further into the great wide open, or do I paddle to Tjärö, the island famous for its delicious lunches? I can see the red and white houses on the island already. Just in front of me is a much smaller island. More of a rock with birds that have turned into silhouettes: cormorants drying out their plumage.
Eriksberg in Blekinge is home to over 200 species of birds, I later learn from Per-Arne Olsson (54). He turns out to be a man of numbers. “We have almost 1200 kinds of butterflies, 16 species of bat, and 117 species of feathermosquito”.
– “Mosquitoes!?!” I interrupt.
“They don’t bite,” Olsson reassures me. He points in the sky. “With a bit of luck, we might also see an osprey today.” He lowers his finger. There is a lake in front of us with six types of water lilies floating in it: yellow, white, pink.
We have just entered the Eriksberg Nature Reserve, a 925-hectare private wildlife park where Olsson has been CEO for 18 years. He knows every animal by name, including their nickname, I suspect. Just in front of us a bison crosses over the road. Fortunately, I was safe in the car. A colossal beast of 500 kilos. Do not panic. Olsson knows who she is: “an old lady.”
Our American videographer Josiah is mind blown: “buffalos, are you’re kidding?” He flew all the way to the Old World, and it turns out that there are bison there, his favourite animal as a child. Modestly he asks: “is it true that they are much smaller than back home?”
Olsson nods: “the European bison, also called lowland wisent, is the smaller cousin of the American Great Bison Belt resident. There are 55 European bison here. You’ll find 5,000 in the wild, spread throughout Europe. If you add the ones in private parks to that figure, including those found in Eriksberg, you reach a total of 7,000 European bison. That sounds like a lot, but to put this in perspective, there are more black rhinos in the world than there are European bison.
What about moose, I want to know? Will we get to see them too? “There are only animals here that have always lived in this area: red deer, fallow deer, wild boar, mouflon,” Olsson says. And European bison so it seems. The Swedish Big Five, you might say, although the moose is missing. It would appear that the vegetation here is unsuitable for this Swedish icon.
A legend
Bengt Berg was one of the founding fathers of the park. Speaking of icons, as well as being an ornithologist Bengt Magnus Kristoffer Berg (1885-1967) was one of the world’s first nature photographers, starting his photographic career in 1910. He was talented and had guts too. He photographed bearded vultures in the The Himalayas out of a hot air balloon. His work was highly regarded as the following tale proves. Back to the year 1925. While Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and the legendary film Pantserkruiser Potjomkin premiere in Berlin, people are queuing up for a completely different film. For four months in a row, people flocked to the Victoria Theatre, one of the biggest movie-theatres of the time, with room for 2600 people.
The theatre is completely sold out twice a day. The speaker is the Swedish nature filmmaker Bengt Berg. And as the audience watches animals they’ve never seen before, such as shoebill storks from South Sudan, a soft voice tells his tales. A man who has been everywhere: Africa, India, Bhutan. A world traveller, nature film pioneer and above all an animal lover. The man who founded the Eriksberg Nature Reserve in 1938. Thanks to him, there are sea eagles left in Sweden. And greylag geese, the golden eagle and the mute swan. A true conservation legend.
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