Field Trip to Piusa

On Thursday, the 13th of September, we went on a field trip “Habitats and Devon’s era sandstone outcrops in Piusa”. The journey started at 9 a.m. and after 45 minutes we arrived at Piusa Visitor Centre. Our tour guide gave us worksheets and showed us a short film about the history of the caves, the quarry and even about animals and insects who live there.

We found out that the quartz sand mining began in 1922. They took sand to the Järvakandi Glass Factory to make bottles and glass. We also discovered that they closed caves in 2006 because of the risk of collapse. The length of the caves is about 20 km. Nowadays it is possible to visit only the Museum Cave, the  other five caves are closed to the public.

During the wintertime bats and butterflies hibernate in the caves. They created the Piusa Cave System Nature Reserve in Piusa Caves to protect thousands of hibernating bats who come there every winter from Latvia, Russia and Estonia.

The film also gave us information about pine groves’ flora growing nearby. We easily filled out the worksheets and went to the next room to draw patterns in the sand with a pendulum that was hanging from the ceiling. Then we went to the chilly and dim cave. The tour guide told us that the first miners were actually women. The visiting area on view was quite small so we could not move around much.

Next, we went to the Piusa hiking trail. We saw a huge sand quarry, where we could run down. On the way back, we made our group photo on the edge of the quarry. We went back to the hiking trail and read the information from the signs to each other with a loud voice.

The undergrowth of the pine grove was the perfect outdoor classroom where we could repeat all the important lichens we had seen in the film. On the edges of the sand quarry ponds, we found rare sundew (Drosera) which is under protection in Estonia. There were Sand Martins’ nests up high in the sand quarry’s slopes.

Reaching back to the Piusa Visitor Centre, we thanked our tour guide and ate the sandwiches given from school canteen. After lunchbreak we went to the bus and it was time to go back home.

Original text by Marie Raudsepp

Translated by Katrinka Josephine Savimägi