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The Oxbow

A short film about a river that changed its mind, and the people who, after fifty years, let it go back where it wanted to flow.

By Tomasz Bór

A lowland river never runs straight. It wears away one bank, drops sand on the other and slowly shifts its bends, until one spring flood cuts through the narrowest neck and leaves a loop on its own. That is how an oxbow forms: a horseshoe-shaped lake that remembers where the water once flowed.

In the 1970s many Polish rivers were straightened. Channels were deepened, banks reinforced, oxbows cut off. The water was meant to flow fast and stay out of the way. It did. And with it, the water from the surrounding meadows drained away fast too.

The film

We shot this film from a drone, flying low over the water at the pace the river itself would move, if it could. The header of this page is an excerpt.

A river bend among green meadows and clumps of trees in the Biebrza valley
The Biebrza valley: one of the last rivers in Europe allowed to meander.Photo: Pudelek (Marcin Szala) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

What happens when the water comes back

River restoration isn’t about rebuilding the past; it is about handing the decisions back to the river. Remove the reinforcements, reconnect the oxbow to the channel and wait. First the fish return, because oxbows are where they spawn. Then amphibians, wading birds and beavers, who start doing the rest of the work for us.

Floodplains, beaver dams and grazing on wet meadows.4 photos

For fifty years we taught the river where to flow. It turned out it knew better.

How a restoration usually unfolds

  1. Year 0

    The stone revetment is removed from the bank and the old bend reopened.

  2. Year 1

    The first flood fills the oxbow. Young pike appear in the shallows.

  3. Year 3

    Water stands on the meadows until June. Lapwings and redshanks come back.

  4. Year 5

    Beavers dam a side channel. The water table in the area rises by tens of centimetres.

Not everyone is happy. Farmers who spent years mowing a dry meadow now have to wait until summer. But the same water that delays the hay harvest saves the wells during a drought. The river is neither good nor bad. It is simply a river.