Skoga, Naturreservat

Skoga is a coniferous forest where pine is the dominant tree species. At just under 22 hectares, Skoga is one of the smaller reserves in Kungsbacka municipality. But visitors who find their way here can experience a sense of wilderness.
On your journey over the green mosses, through the knee-high blueberry bushes and up slippery slopes, you can see many different things. From giant spruce trees to low-growing pines hundreds of years old and mighty stumps covered in layers of lichen. The path is sometimes blocked by flames; lying dead trees. Some are completely covered in brushwood and moss and can only be seen as an outline against the ground. Others have recently been felled by the wind and show fresh traces of the insects that live in the dead wood. The hollows and passages gnawed out by the insects under the bark are almost like hieroglyphics.

Unusual beetles and old lichens

The availability of old, coarse trees and dead wood in various stages of decay has made Skoga something of an Eldorado for bugs. Especially when it comes to beetles, Skoga has very high natural values. One of the reserve's rarer inhabitants is the bronze lion, a beetle that has only been found in a couple of places in Halland. The bronze lion only occurs in slow-growing natural forests where the spruces are allowed to grow old. In the southern part of the reserve, the stream Hallabäck runs between late-growing spruces. In this swamp forest, the spruce trunks are almost completely covered with old spruce lichen, and here and there you can also see patches of cat's foot lichen. These species are so-called signal species that show that the forest has high natural values with a long history of old trees.

Many old pines

The majority of the area is dominated by pine forest. Drill samples have shown that several of the pines began to grow as early as 250 years ago. However, it is not the tallest and largest pines that are oldest; many of the younger trees are taller than their predecessors. Instead, the older trees are distinguished from the younger ones by having a flat crown and a coarser and different bark structure. Over the centuries, the bark has aged and cracked into decimeter-sized pieces. The surface is flat and smooth and the pattern that forms is somewhat reminiscent of the turtle shell. This bark structure is known as turtle bark, armored bark and crocodile bark.