Biedrība · Non-profit associationGuardians of the pine, keepers of the herd
For more than three decades, Mednieku Klubs Mežvidus has worked quietly in the forests of Latvia — counting hooves in the snow, hauling hay to feeding racks in January, clearing dumped waste from roadside stands, and teaching a new generation that a forest is not a warehouse but a household.
1993 — 2026
"We do not own this forest. We are the generation currently on duty."
Mežvidus was formed in 1993 by eleven foresters and farmers from the Vidzeme uplands who had spent the previous decades watching game populations swing violently between neglect and overuse. They wrote a single sentence into the founding charter that still governs everything the association does: the forest must be left in better condition than the year we found it.
Today the association unites 84 full members and some 130 seasonal volunteers who together steward roughly 6,400 hectares of leased and cooperatively managed woodland. We are not a commercial operator. Every euro of membership dues, donation and public grant is returned to the field in the form of feed, fencing, monitoring equipment, seedlings, fuel for clean-up lorries and materials for our school programme.
Our members are hunters, and we say so plainly. In Latvia, regulated hunting is the instrument by which ungulate numbers are kept in balance with young forest stands, by which African swine fever is contained, and by which wildlife-vehicle collisions on rural roads are reduced. We treat that instrument as a duty carried out under strict discipline, never as a sport of trophies.
Three decades, in numbers
What we do
From the first hard frost until the thaw, twenty-seven racks and salt licks are stocked weekly with hay, oats, root crops and mineral salt so that roe deer, red deer and boar survive the lean months without stripping young plantations.
Annual counts along fixed transects, camera-trap grids and snow-track surveys produce the data behind every cull quota we submit to the State Forest Service. No shot is taken outside an approved, documented plan.
Four times a year our members and their families sweep roadside stands, drainage ditches and lay-bys of illegally dumped waste — an average of eleven tonnes recovered and properly disposed of each season.
Seminars for schools, landowners and new members on safe conduct in the forest, first aid, wildlife disease, firearm discipline and the ethics of taking an animal's life responsibly.
Volunteers, landowners, ecologists, students and municipalities are welcome to join a feeding round, a clean-up day or a seminar. Write to us and we will put you on the list for the next outing.