Our rooms may be a little dark but the excellent breakfast went some way to compensate. It’s nice having a cooked breakfast prepared by someone else and the scrambled eggs were very good indeed, especially when accompanied by a selection from the cold meat tray, together with some fresh tomato and pickled gherkins, lovely! However we couldn’t take our time too much over breakfast as our next walk was scheduled for 10:00 and before that, once again we had to take Rosemary to seek some medical assistance. This time, poor thing, she’d picked up a tick and noticed it when she was in the shower. It was on her back, just above the waist but it hadn’t really started feeding as it wasn’t that bloated. Try as I might, using two credit cards like forceps, I wasn’t able to get it to detach, hence the search for assistance after breakfast. This assistance came by way of two nurses at the local medical centre who saw Rosemary right away and two minutes more or less later, she was out, sans tick. What fabulous service! Contrast that to a visit to A&E in the UK…

Now I have to confess to a little disappointment and I think it’s fair that we all felt it. The forest may be unique and worthy of UNESCO recognition, but for us plebs, it just looked like any woodland we’d been in, with the exception, perhaps, of more than the usual amount of dead lumber lying around. The oak trees were also longer and straighter than what we are used to in the UK but according to the internet, we have older specimens, the oldest here are about 600 years old and ours are approaching 1000 years, so there! Still, it was lovely walking through pristine, more or less, forest but it wasn’t quite the ethereal experience we expected. One sight we didn’t expect to see and it was a chilling one, was a number of crosses dotted about, denoting a spot where partisans had been executed during WW2, apparently several hundred during the course of the war.

At the end of the tour we wanted some lunch, but not too much as we would be having a relatively early meal before our next meeting with Joanna, as at 20:00 we were planning to do a 4 hour night excursion. Here in Poland, or at least in this part, it is hard to buy a simple, light lunch in a restaurant so after a couple of attempts, we ended up in the small supermarket and bought some ham & cheese etc and had a snack in our room, followed by a sleep ( sad getting old) and later, we found a restaurant next door to the Tourist Office where we all had venison with some pickled vegetables and potato dumplings (tasteless, gooey things) (Julie & Rosemary) and buckwheat groats (me, much better, whatever that was!).

At 20:00 our favourite guide appeared and we ran her back to her house to pick up the night vision binoculars that we had hired for the occasion. Joanna had brought the ordinary binoculars that we had used yesterday and very good they were too but the night vision ones, being heavier, were a load too much for her to carry. She also had her own thermal imaging ‘scope to use and for us to have a look through and I must say, the latter proved by far the most useful as the night vision binoculars are only effective at relatively short distances – most animals we encountered were too far away for them.

We set off, full of anticipation and the very first thing that Joanna wanted to show us were the beavers, in town, right next to the bridge that we had crossed earlier that day with Maria. Now we did see bubbles and a wake where they had been and we could also see traces of a brown back in the reeds but that was all. After 15 minutes we gave up and went in search of bigger critters. Fortunately, after a short period of time, in one of the bison-friendly meadows, I spotted a lone bull in the distance and we were able to get close enough to get some decent photos (with appropriate allowance for the poor light and cheap camera ie not BBC wildlife level of sophistication). It was a fabulous feeling, seeing this magnificent beast less than 50 metres away. He was aware of us, his tail was twitching a little to show that he was not 100% relaxed but after a while, he settled down and chilled out. A very special moment. Just think, only 300 years ago, these fabulous animals were to be found over the whole of mainland Europe and now there are something like 6000 left in the whole of the world. Shame on us.

As dusk deepened the ordinary optical binoculars became unusable so we took up the image-intensifying ones. These had two buttons on, the first one activated the system which made maximum use of the available light and the second, only to be used when quite dark, sent out a laser-like beam of light that would illuminate an object at some considerable distance, at least that was the theory. However, by far and away more useful in spotting animals was Joanna’s personal thermal imaging monocular (picks up infra-red and animals glow in the dark, with the hottest areas a red colour) and with the aid of this, we could drive slowly past the meadows and spot things. We didn’t see any more bison, so it was a good thing that we had seen our friend earlier else we would all have been disappointed but we did see numerous red and roe deer in the far distance, too far for our light-intensifying binoculars which in reality are only good over distances of tens of metres. It was fun looking at the deer, knowing that they had no inkling that we were watching them. At one juncture something spooked the small herd that we were watching and they all disappeared back into the forest – I like to think it was a wolf but we didn’t see anything; later, we did however follow a fox whilst it was out hunting.

All good things come to an end and as it was approaching midnight, we decided to call it quits and we dropped the ever-enthusiastic Joanna off at her home in order that she got enough rest prior to her 9 am. group tomorrow – hard worker that she is. She definitely made our sessions together quite special, we are lucky and grateful to have found her.