Description of the attraction
The complex nature reserve "Gryada Vyaryamyanselka" is an important protected natural area located in the Priozersky district of the Leningrad region, which is 4 km north of the village of Michurinskoye and one km from the village of Yagodnoye. You can get to the reserve from the city of St. Petersburg, driving to the railway station called Petyajärvi.
The work of the reserve began in 1976. By a 1996 state decree, the natural monument was transferred to the section of the state nature reserve of regional importance. The purpose of creating a complex reserve was the preservation of the largest Russian water-glacial ridge in area with extraordinary relief forms, a rich variety of vegetation, a unique hydrological network and the rarest species of not only flora, but also fauna. State control over the natural complex is represented by the government of the Leningrad Region, or rather the Committee for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of the Leningrad Region.
The total area of the nature reserve is 7279 hectares, including 556 hectares of lakes. The reserve stretches along the southern territory of the Privuoksinskaya lowland in the direction from west to east. The entire ridge is more than 50 km long, and its width is approximately 2.5 km. On the southern side, the ridge is adjoined by a large and rather developed lake system with a large number of channels and streams.
The Vyaryamyanselka Ridge belongs to the so-called pre-Quaternary relief, which separates the Privuoksinsky depression and the vast Kotovskoe plateau. The ridge is an ozovo-kam complex, composed not only of sandy, but also gravel-sandy material, with huge hollows, the depth of which reaches 35 meters with a diameter of 400-500 meters. The highest maximum height reaches about 80 meters. In the zone where the ridge is located, there is the only outcrop of gray-bluish sandstones belonging to the Gdov horizon in the entire northwestern part of Russia.
Not far from this territory, there is virtually all the variety of pine forests located in the Leningrad region. The largest zone is occupied mainly by green moss and green moss-lichen forests. It should be noted that sphagnum and long-moss pine forests are quite rare. Birch and spruce forests are especially diverse in composition, but small in area. In the north-west of the nature reserve there are a couple of plots of green moss-lichen-moss birch forest, unusual for the north-western zone; on the southern side of the lake shore there is an extended stretch of linden and birch forest, in which the height of some lindens reaches a height of 20-22 meters.
In the zone where the reserve is located, the rarest plant species for this territory grow, which include: a filthy ostrich, circumpolar astragalus, marsh telipteris, pemphigus, lacustrine, Dortman's lobelia, umbrella winter-lover, as well as several types of lumbago, such as open, meadow and spring …
As for the fauna of the complex reserve, it is more typical for the middle zone of the Karelian Isthmus. Not only a huge variety of forest birds lives here, but you can also find nesting places for a large number of daytime predators: hobby, wasp eater, goshawk, as well as a number of species of owls: uphill owl, long-eared owl, long-tailed and bearded owls. Black and spotted woodpeckers, black swift, nightjar, and crested tit are quite common in this area, but the gray woodpecker is rarely seen here. Whirligig nests can be found among young pine forests. In the canyons of the Volch'ya River and along the coastal areas, there are blackhead and garden warbler, songbird and blackbird, white-browed and fieldfare.
Specially protected objects of the nature reserve include water-glacial landforms, forests, a river and lake network, rare species of animals and plants: tuft, lacustrine, whirligig, meadow lumbago and many other representatives of flora and fauna.
