How mowing less lets flowers bloom along Austria's 'Green Belt'

Sankt Anna am Aigen, Austria: On a meadow in southeastern Austria near the border with Slovenia, Josef Hadler is working his tractor to mow several ac...

Sankt-Anna am Aigen, Austria: On a meadow in southeastern Austria near the border with Slovenia, Josef Hadler is working his tractor to mow several acres of land in a bid to better preserve the plot's biodiversity.

"Yesterday, a buzzard followed me at a distance of only five metres," the cattle farmer told AFP in the municipality of Sankt Anna am Aigen in the Styria province.

Thanks to Hadler's efforts for the local nature conservation association, endemic species of flora and fauna that have disappeared elsewhere have been able to survive on the 15 hectares (37 acres) of protected land he manages.

Located where the Iron Curtain once separated Austria from the former Yugoslavia, the fields near the Slovenian border are rich in biodiversity, precisely because the area used to be a no-go zone during the Cold War.

It is also part of the wider "European Green Belt" along the former Iron Curtain, a corridor of interconnected wildlife havens that stretches 12,500 kilometres (just over 7,700 miles) from Norway to Turkey.