Nordstranden - engelsk
Nordstranden
Intro
Taking a walk along the Northern Beach, you will pass a wood that appears wild, but was actually laid out as a plantation and later felled. Earlier, there was an oak forest on Tunø, and king Valdemar the Great (1131-1182) came here to hunt.
Taking a walk along the Northern Beach, you will pass a wood that appears wild, but was actually laid out as a plantation and later felled. Earlier, there was an oak forest on Tunø, and king Valdemar the Great (1131-1182) came here to hunt.
In 1216 Tunø was owned by the Catholic Church in Aarhus, and during the building of Aarhus Cathedral, taxes were collected on the island in the form of oak timber for the construction as well as the furnishings.
For many years, the islanders used this area as common grazing land for their cattle, but between 1901 and 1912 a wood was planted here. Each farm then had its own plot of woodland.
Today, the woodland on Tunø is mainly mixed forest consisting of Scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris), birch (Betula), common alder (Alnus glutinosa), oak (Quercus robur), willow (Salix) and ash (Fraxinus excélsior). The southern part of the wood is very damp and the dominant species here are birch, willow and common alder.
The wood is home to several common species of birds including tits (Paridae), chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs), woodpeckers (Picidae) and the common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus). Towards the central part of the island where the wood opens up into fenland, some rarer species may be seen such as the Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) and the marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus).
Tunø wildlife is unique, as there are neither foxes, moles nor squirrels. Instead, hares are prolific.