Torsmyran

In Torsmyran’s swelling peat moss tufts, sundews lure bugs to their doom. The glistening droplets on the leaves are not sweet nectar – they are the sundew’s sticky digestive fluid. When an insect lands, it becomes stuck.

The sundew, one of our insectivorous plants, is just one of many species that has adapted to life in the apparently barren and monotonous mire environment. In the mighty Torsmyran, one of the largest and most varied mires along the Norrland coast, you can meet many more.

Teeming animal life

Golden plovers, wood sandpipers, common greenshanks, curlews, red-throated divers, whooper swans, meadow pipits and yellow wagtails all breed out on the mire.

The mire also boasts a rich insect fauna. It is home to 16 different ground beetles, 27 different water beetles, 5 species of waterbugs and 8 dragonflies and damselflies!

Scots pines and sundews

Scots pines, tufts of rusty bog-moss and dwarf birches grow out among the mosses, fens and mires. Soft bog-moss and sundews grow in the wet areas. You shouldn’t enter the even wetter parts of the mire at all. Only sedge and flatleaf bladderwort grow in these “mud-bottoms” – mud holes, quite simply.

Trapping pits

In the western part of the reserve, there is a 370 metre-long trapping pit system comprising 12 pits. The pits are now half a metre deep. When they were in use, they were really deep, probably up to two metres. Trapping pits were used to hunt elk from the Stone Age up until 1864, when they were banned.