The third day on the road was devoted to a round trip to Minerve, one of the oldest villages in France. However I was at least as much interested in the huge gorge that stretches out to the West, as I reckoned there was a chance of seeing some wallcreepers, a bird I have wanted to see for a long time but isn't too predictable and varies its nesting sites.
It wasn't to be. In spite of extensive work with the binoculars, all I could see apart from a few crows and other hirondelles was a good number of crag martins flying around the gorge, plus a fleeting sighting of a red-rumped swallow. Notably the River Cesse was totally dry, so one suspects this may have had an effect. The absence of birds of prey was disappointing as some quite exotic species have been seen here in the past.
I got a bit distracted into looking at butterflies again in a flower meadow, where a wall brown, a grayling and another brown argus were to be seen. The latter is interesting in that the black spot on the upper wing is encircled by white. This is normally a characterstic of the French version of Spanish Argus but other aspects of this worn specimen don't suggest any further similarity.
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| Wall Brown |
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| Grayling |
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| Brown Argus |
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After still not seeing interesting birdlife in Minerve itself, I managed to catch up with a couple of chalkhill blues 'at it' by the roadside. Again there are several subspecies to choose from but I think they were pretty much the standard offering.
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| Chalkhill Blue |
After that the wind got up and I headed for the swimming pool in the B&B at Olonzac.
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| Long-tailed Blues |
Day 3 was another canalside run through to Narbonne, some delightful scenery breaking up some of the more monotonous sections. Again the butterflies got active once the afternoon was underway, and there were a few nice common blues on the hook in the Canal just past Paraza. Then, on passing a lock just after Le Somail, I noticed some faster flying blues homing in on a single plant. They didn't settle very long so photographs were hard to get but the distinctive underwing pattern shows that they were long-tailed blues - even though one was hard put to see the actual tail, which is basically just a bristle.
A little later I managed to identify at least one bird, a black redstart. It was surprising not to see more of them in the wine producing areas which are common around here.
Riding past a woodland area next top the canal, I then caught sight of a swallowtail which didn't settle. At first I thought it wasn't the stadard variety as it was flying rather delicately. Past the Port de la Robine, I followed another for ages without it settling before I finally got a shot of a delapidated specimen, clearly a standard swallowtail. Something similar was happening with coppers, as I thought, but when I got one to settle on the path, also just past the Port de la Robine, it proved to be, as far as I could determine, a sparsely marked spotted fritillary.
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| Swallowtail |
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| Spotted Fritillary |
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Following a cross country diversion away from the Canal, I managed to see a couple of decent-sized fish, probably dace or carp but they bolted under a bridge as soon as they saw me and couldn't be induced to re-emerge by flicking a few sundry titbits into the water.
Interesting!
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