Ici et Là dans la France Rurale

   This title means, "Here and There in Rural France"

   We left our little base in Niort. We had never heard of that little city before, but Noirt is the fourth richest city in France. It had everything we might need without being as obnoxious as a large city would have been. Restaurants we have enjoyed everywhere. Berry and I discussed why the French produce such fine food. The huge agricultural base they have to draw from, the way they attack everything using a systematic approach; professional pride in a culture obsessed with food, relatively cheap labor.

   We drove the back roads, through parts the country that no tourist has ever seen. There was a small town called Dirac. We stopped to peek inside a store and get a coffee. There were four old gentlemen drinking cognac at 11am in the morning. Each small town has at least one such "Bar Tabac" for old men to imbibe. Each town also has a Catholic church. Each town has a mayor's office called the "mairie", with the French flag.

   One of the two Life Birds we saw this morning was the Grey Partridge (Perdix Perdix). We saw him in a small village named Couture D'Argensous. The Grey Partridge is a gamebird in the pheasant family. It is a rotund bird, brown-backed, with grey flanks and chest. The belly is white, usually marked with a large chestnut-brown horse-shoe mark. We saw him walking down the middle of the rural road that we were driving on.

   It was right before lunch. We were at a stop sign and we spotted a thrush like bird in the bush, out the passenger window. We ultimately identified it as a Black Redstart (Phoenicurus Ochruros). As we often do, the more we discussed the bird the better and more sure of the identification. It is deeply gray with a black head and the most remarkable rufous tail.

   Voyaging down the back ways as we were doing, we accidentally fell into heavy traffic in the Dordogne region. Périgeux is very much like Gatlinburg, TN, but with the tiniest roads created before the invention of the car. Robert got stuck in a line of stalled cars, drove into a cul-de-sac and tried to turn a rental car around in an alley about ten feet across. We quickly decided to head up into the countryside where we had enjoyed birding before.

   Right now, we are installed in Arcachon, France. It is a smallish city just south of the big city of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast, near Spain. We got a room and had dinner. Then we were hit up on by our first bum on this trip, a woman with an unkept dog. She reeked of alcohol. Her dog's name was Tintin, like the Belgian cartoon character. Tintin himself had a dog named "Snowy".

Robert and Berry

Photos courtesy of wikipedia