Early spring in Mecklenburg
Hi,
last Saturday I visited my relatives in my hometown Neubrandenburg / Mecklenburg-Westpommerania / north-east of Germany and did also a small trip by bicycle. It was one of the first really warm days after the almost half-year-long winter. The sun was shining from a blue sky and it was wonderful to hear the birds singing again, to see butterflies on the first tiny blossoms and to see how nature awakes from its long sleep in the winter. The trees are still as grey as before but the light changed their appearance and the 16°C felt really warm after the cold of the last months.
So I went to the “Marliner Bachtal”, a small valley of the brook “Marliner Bach” nearby my hometown. This valley has a unique micro-climate and lots of rare plants and birds can be found in this little valley which is only a few kilometres long and some hundreds metres wide. In the valley it looks like this:
The hills are covered with a thin forest and the bottom of the valley is covered with a mix of meadows and forests. The little brook winds through the valley and has normally only a water level of approximately three feet. But now the land is wet after the snowy winter and the level ascended to about four till five feet. The current is strong in some parts and the water is still very cold.
As an aquarist I was also interested in the aquatic flora and fauna. No fishes or other animals could be seen in the water. The riverbed which consists of sand and small pebbles was bare as well as most stones, only in the strongest current some of the bigger ones are covered with a thin layer of algae and willow moss, Fontinalis antipyretica .
The water level must have been higher in the last weeks because some of the moss grows now above the water line. Normally it can be found only submerse in a very strong current. But it looked like this on some stones:
On the shores of the brook only single plants can be found:
It is probably a Hydrocotyle species which grows abundantly near rivers and ponds but normally not submerse.
Some small ponds were also nearby the brook. They were covered with algae and dead leaves of the surrounding trees. Except for the first mosquito larvae and cyclops and other insects nothing else was found in them.
Here are some more impressions of this wonderful afternoon:
BTW, all pictures were taken by myself with my Canon PowerShot A200 and were only resized later on.
best regards
Robert
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