Natagora
Hello everyone,
We are in Germany, in Vetschau. We live in a community called Vier Linden. We have been there for the past two weeks and we sleep in a yellow trailer, and that, is very very awesome!
Today: our experience in Natagora.
From the 11th to the 23rd of december, we have spent some time at Huguette Reynaert's place via the organisation Natagora.
What is Natagora ?
It's a Waloon (south, french speaking Belgium) organisation which has the goal to buy lands to let them live naturaly. They then become natural reserve. The nature is the priority and the human actions are only there to allow a good and balanced development of every species.
It is, in Wallonia, 210 natural reserves, more than 4700 acres.
It is volunteers, activities on discovering nature, hundreds of members, and most of all, passionated people.
Who is Huguette ?
Huguettes is a custodian (gardian of nature) who lives with her loyal partner Charly in Semois-Ardenaise, in Belgium, close to the french border. She has hosted us for two weeks and we participated to the natural reserve maintenance. She also creates little objects such as: stuffed animals, jewllery, knitting, crochet, sculptures, drawings, paintings... A true praise to nature! And all of this she sells to profit Natagora, in her little education center in Chairiere, a small but nice village.
The natural reserve Bois sous les granges, where we spent most of our time is the closest reserve to Huguette's house. It has got two biotopes. A biotope is a place that gathers a particular and visible ecosystem. In this reserve there is one forest biotope and one swamp biotope. We have cleaned the grants (duckboard) aiming to clarify the way for the visits, cut some willow in the swamp to light them and give them to the sheeps so they can eat their barks wich are healthy for them. We also have pulled out little trees to plant them in another reserve: La grande prairie (the big grassland), aside of the river Semois. We also helped Huguette with the preparation of objects for the education days with kids (bird feeders,...). Through our hikes with Huguette and Charly, we have discovered how to look for animals with sounds and footprints. We also learn to recognize plants. Our education on wildlife and flora is growing. Thanks to that we were able to see a boar, paniqued deer because of the hunters, and roitelets (very small bird),...
Thanks Huguette for being so passionated. We also got to learn few words of Dutch like paddenstoel wich means toad chair: mushroom.
Someone else we really appreciated: Pierre.
Pierre kindly took us on a ''tour'' of the Semois-Ardennaise region. He also is a volunteer member at Natagora. We have done many extreme hikes with the IGN maps, beaver dam, and wet boots. Yes for Pierre, a succesfull hike is when you discover new places and when you get off of the usual way! That we really liked. In addition during these hikes we got to find many different Natagora reserve. Thanks to Pierre we have met Galoe cows and their farmer. It's a cow that has celtic origins and which is more resistant to bad weather, they spend the whole year outside and mow the grass of the reserves. Pierre is really admiring the nature surrounding, for him, no need to go very far, the wonder is here, and it's beautiful to witness that. Thanks.
Thanks Pierre for the pictures.
The words for these two weeks are: wonderful, observation, isolation, growing up, wonder, landing.
Website of Natagora: http://www.natagora.be/index.php?id=accueil&no_cache=1
Link to one of Huguette's video where we see the animals of the reserve: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r0PjTeuG9Ic
A little more for the interested one, in our last article we talked about the organisation "Terre en Vue'' in Belgium, a loyal follower told us that in France there is a similar organisation called ''Terre de Liens'' wich saves as well areas for biological agriculture. Their website: https: //www.terredeliens.org/
We're still moving slowly, with you all.
Your A&A team, in great shape.
PS1: in Belgium there is a city called JAMBES (leg in french...).
PS2: thanks Louise for pointing out Natagora.