The most important holiday accessory is a good insurance policy. !TRAVEL NOTESGETTING THERE: First Club Holidays (081-567 5112) offers flights to Dalaman, in south-east Turkey, for £222 return, departing from Heathrow. Campus Travel provides return flights to Dalaman from Heathrow for £214 return, which are open to all. There is a regular bus service from Dalaman to Oludeniz, changing at Fethiye. The journey takes approximately 112 hours and will cost around £25.PARAGLIDING TOURS: Greendragons Paragliding runs holidays in Oludeniz for between £509 and £699 for seven days The season lasts from April to the end of October Paraglider hire is extra (about £60). Greendragons is at 633 Rainham Road South, Dagenham, Essex RM10 8AH (081-517 7945; fax 081-593 5271). The Sussex College of Paragliding also organises trips to Turkey.
Phone or write for details to 10 Crescent Road, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 3RP (0273 609925).At Oludeniz itself, several local companies run courses, including Grida (010 90252 6166801) and Sport Flying and Tourism (010 90252 6147076). If you don’t fancy embarking on the (fairly long) learning curve, all the above companies do tandem flying, in which you are strapped into a double harness with a very experienced pilot Tandem flights cost about £60. In Britain, paragliding is governed by the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, which can supply details of schools (0533 611322; fax: 0533 611323).FURTHER INFORMATION: Turkish National Tourist Board, Egyptian House, 1st Floor, 170-173 Piccadilly, London W1V 9DD (071-734 8681).. FINLAND’S Liesjarvi National Park is home to some of Europe’s most spectacular forests. Walking among the dark pines and spruces, scattering the yellow aspen and birch leaves underfoot, it’s easy to imagine how Jean Sibelius was inspired by them. To the vast majority of their admirers, these forests appear as natural as nature intended Doubtless the great Finnish composer thought so too
But appearances can be deceptive.
The trees here may be thriving, but much of the wildlife they support is heading towards extinction. One of the main reasons is a shortage of rotting wood – along with the “rotters” that decompose it – and an unhealthy human preoccupation with keeping forests “tidy”.
In Finland, as in every European country, natural forest has become exceedingly rare. Ever since man began managing timber – for house- and ship-building, iron-making, or just for firewood – dead and decaying wood has been taboo. Foresters are obsessed with tidiness and healthy trees; dead branches get in their way, and make their pristine forests less viable.We have, as a result, become used to a sanitised version of forest. A few dead branches strewn about spark fears that the whole eco-system is about to self-destruct Fallen branches are invariably removed.
Decay in living trees – if they are of commercial value – is cut or treated. Any trees that fall prematurely are cut up and cleared away.Most disastrously of all, no trees are left to become naturally gnarled and aged, impressive because of their very senescence. They are no longer allowed to shed their huge limbs as they, very slowly, give up their own lives to provide a habitat for other forest creatures.In natural forest, by comparison, half the timber will be in various stages of decomposition: age-old giants with dead limbs, fallen branches, rotting stumps. Whole trees, enormous with age, will have fallen on the forest floor and become home to a plethora of colourful fungi and hordes of wood-boring insects – forest life from the dead.Dead wood is a forest’s richest wildlife habitat. In Britain, one-fifth of our insects – particularly beetles, flies, spiders and pseudoscorpions (harmless scorpion lookalikes) – are utterly dependent for their survival on dead timber. Wasp-mimicking flies, longhorn beetles, click beetles, hornets, robber flies, weevils and many others thrive on it So, too, does an array of fungi.
The white, fan-shaped funnels of angel’s wings grow on rotting conifers; the pale, yellow-brown gregarious elf cap on oak stumps; and the cream, aptly-named cauliflower fungus – an edible one – on the base of pines. There are hundreds more.This army of rotters slowly decomposes the dead timber, returning nutrients to the soil. Expensive fertilisers add what rotters would do for free, processing up to 10 tonnes of dead wood per hectare each year. Forest insects also provide a rich food supply for a third of Britain’s woodland bird species, including woodpeckers, warblers and titmice.”Around 40 per cent of these creatures are threatened with extinction Europe-wide,” says Dr Martin Speight, an expert on the insects that thrive on dead wood who works for Ireland’s wildlife service. “Some populations are now up to 1,000 miles apart because so few forests have any significant quantity of dead timber left.” Ancient forests have a larger number of threatened species than any other habitat Most are rotters.
