(gentle music)
(bird cawing)
(footsteps crunching)
(buck calling)
- [Duarte] Welcome back to the Southern Carpathian Mountains.
Today, we will be taking you to our planting area
and showing you some of the efforts behind the scenes.
This trip to Romania was different.
We're normally there for a few weeks
during the planting season.
However, because of the pandemic, we did all our planting
through our local partner, Carpathian,
as we could spend only 72 hours in the country ourselves.
This meant that Hannah, our consolation biologist
in charge of reforestation,
could not visit this specific planting area
as she had to take a COVID test that morning
to be able to leave the country in two days time.
Nevertheless, she is very familiar with the area
and its ecology from previous visits, so I'd like to start
by letting her briefly describe our planting area.
- Hello, everyone, Hannah here
to tell you about our planting area
in the Southern Carpathian Mountains.
This whole area has been logged for timber.
Though not all the trees are taken,
those that remain are left isolated and unprotected
from the harsh weather.
The exposed hillside also suffers
the effects of soil erosion.
To protect the hillside from erosion
and speed up the regeneration of the forest,
we planted 12,000 trees in the autumn of 2020.
We planted predominantly Norway Spruce
due to the altitude of the site
but some broad leaf trees like European Beech
to restore the natural diversity of the forest.
- My second companion in this whirlwind 72 hour trip
was Ria, the lovely character
behind our podcast and social media.
She recorded a really nice sound experience of our trip
which I recommend you check out on the Eco Side Podcast.
After leaving Hannah to go to her COVID test,
we drove up the mountains following Mehi Cosgin,
the ranger in charge of our planting area in Tamasu.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Southern Carpathians.
We are here following the successful planting
of our fall batch, and we're now driving
to our most recent planting area.
And we're gonna do some filming with the drone,
some aerial 360 photos to show you guys
where your trees are being planting,
so everyone can visit our projects.
Now you know the kind of drive that you can expect.
Four wheel drive, snow, ice and mud and rocks.
(passenger laughing)
We have now arrived at one of the polygons
where we planted trees this fall.
We planted roughly 12,000 trees here in this area.
And we're looking now to go and fly the drone.
But as you can see, it is a bit foggy,
so we're currently waiting on the weather
to change a little bit.
So we're now at 300 meters, and this is the beautiful view
of our planting area.
As you can see, it's absolutely fantastic.
So we have just wrapped up the first batch of filming.
The fog, unfortunately, has not lifted,
but we think we got some interested images for you
to get a real feel for how our planting area looks like,
especially how our trees spend the winter in fog and snow.
So, we hope you enjoy those,
and we're gonna go for a little break now
and wait a little bit in our car while the weather clears
as it is a bit cold to be waiting outside.
Ria, how's your first impression
of the Carpathian Mountains?
- Stunning, but it's because I'm Bambi.
- Bambi, yes we have some nice footage,
which I'm sure I will include in this video at some point
of Ria slipping about.
It's your third time in the snow, you said?
- Yup, pretty much.
(laughing)
- So we were just having lunch now,
and suddenly we had some clouds part,
and we can now see the mountains in the back,
and we can probably see our planting area
properly for the first time today.
So I'm going to run up the mountain
and get the drone flying,
see if I can still capture some stuff for today.
And I hope you will be looking at some nice images
of where your trees are planted, woo!
(soft orchestral music)
We had success on our mission
to properly capture the polygon.
The clouds parted for 10 minutes.
I ran back up the mountain as fast as I could,
and I flew out the drone,
and now we have some beautiful images
which we're very excited to share
instead of the foggy images that we had before.
So yeah, and when the clouds part,
we have these beautiful views here
over the mountains in the Carpathians.
Such a wonderful place.
If you ever get a chance in a post-COVID world,
we would highly recommend you come and see
where your trees are and you come and see
this beautiful wilderness, full of bears, lynx
and wolves and beautiful landscapes
as you can see behind me right there.