A Week Away in Languedoc

Although we have visited France many times over the years, there is still so much of it to see. We have just returned from a week in Languedoc in south west France which is an interesting area of the country that I had never been to before. We were part of a guided Naturetrek holiday but, while the rest of the group flew into Carcassonne, we took two nights to drive down through France to join them.

After taking the ferry from Dover to Calais, we stayed near Troyes on the first night, visiting the Champagne house of Drappier to buy a few bottles of their delicious champagne the next morning. It was then a long drive south to the tiny wine village of Gigondas just into Provence for the second:

A mountainous Gigondas vineyard in front of the Dentelles of Montmirail. We had returned to the family-run hotel of Les Florets in Gigondas where we had spent a few nights ten years previously. Since that time the wine of Gigondas has been one of our firm favourites

When we finally arrived in Languedoc on the third day, we saw that there must also be a great deal of wine produced there too. Every scrap of agricultural land in the region is covered in vines:

What is not suitable for vines is covered by the natural garrigue scrubland vegetation:

Our hotel for the week was in a little village near Narbonne, close to the foothills of the Pyrenees and the Spanish border.

The area of Languedoc that we covered on the holiday

There were fourteen of us in the group and two guides, Jason and Martin, and for the next week we travelled around the region in two minibuses.

Each day we visited numerous wildlife hotspots as well as several interesting Cathar sites over the course of the week. The Cathars were a religious people that lived in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. But the Catholic Church saw their beliefs as a threat and persecuted them over many years until the Medieval Inquisition eventually wiped them out in 1350. By that time about one million people had been slaughtered

The town of Minerve, built on a rock in the middle of a gorge, was a stronghold of the Cathars

A model in the town museum depicting the siege at Minerve in 1210, when Christian Crusaders – mainly French but some English as well – surrounded the town. The steep gorge made it virtually impossible to storm but the Crusaders had four trebuchets with which to bombard the town with rocks. After a month, Minerve fell and 140 Cathars who had refused to repent for their beliefs were burned at the stake

The weather was calm and dry all week. However, France had had an unusually wet winter and early spring, resulting in many more mosquitos around than normal. This was a problem on the first day when we weren’t properly prepared for them and all got badly bitten. As a result we remained swathed in long sleeves and trousers for the rest of the week despite the heat, although few mosquitoes were subsequently encountered.

Jason and Martin prepared an al fresco picnic lunch for us every day, which we always ate surrounded by beautiful nightingale song. In fact nightingales were singing wherever we went in the countryside throughout the holiday

We saw around 120 species of bird over the course of the week, many of which Dave and I hadn’t seen before. I managed to get photos of some of them:

A young Bonelli’s eagle. The purple ring shows that this bird was ringed in its nest somewhere in France. This is a non-migratory eagle species that eats rabbits and medium sized birds but the global population is estimated to be only 21,000-24,000

A short-toed snake eagle. This is a migratory, snake-specialist eagle with a global population of 94,000

70-95% of this eagle’s diet is made up of snakes, the rest being lizards. It is unusual amongst eagles because it has the ability to hover like a kestrel whilst it scans the ground for its prey and this is what it was doing here

We saw short-toed snake eagles most days. We were watching one when another one dramatically shot in from the side and locked talons with it, but unfortunately I only managed a photo once they had broken apart again

A blue rock thrush was one of the birds I particularly wanted to see. Jason played its call on his phone at the Gorge de Galamus and three males answered him, which was very exciting. We finally managed to spot one of them as well

I had never seen a Kentish plover before but here is a male with his very dark and incomplete breast band

We stopped in the little village of Fleury for coffee because it is known for its population of lesser kestrels. There are some small differences in appearance between our normal kestrels and these lesser ones, but the really obvious difference is that lesser kestrels live in groups in towns. We must have seen about ten of them flying around the rooftops of Fleury

We also saw a spotless starling in Fleury. Closely related to our common starling but without any spots in summer

Serins were singing their little hearts out in Fleury and in every other village we visited..

House martins were putting the final touches to their nests in the eaves of some of the houses. Swifts were also flying around the villages – I was so envious of how many of them were around. Good to know that they would be catching all those mosquitoes for us as well

There were quite a few cirl buntings to be seen too

A punky young grey heron sticks its head up in its nest. In this photo it looks like there is also a stork in the nest, but the stork nest was immediately behind the heron’s

In France, greater flamingos only breed in The Camargue, so these pale ones hanging out in Languedoc will be young non-breeding birds

Although it was a bit early for rollers to arrive, Jason spotted one on the last afternoon. An extremely colourful bird but a shame it wasn’t a bit closer. Other notable birds seen were great spotted cuckoo, whinchat shrike and lesser bustard but I didn’t manage to get photos of these

Although the winds were not really in the right direction, we spent a while at a coastal bird migration watch point at Leucate, along with a group of cool young French people who were conducting an official count of the arriving birds

They had a board showing this year’s arrivals to date compared with the totals from previous years. They had counted 121,931 common swifts (Martinet noir) shooting in over their heads so far, and it’s been a good year for chaffinches (Pinson des arbres), serins and starlings (Étourneau sansonnet )

But it wasn’t all about the birds. We saw a lot of butterfly species too.

There were many orchid species to be seen at this time of year as well. Everyone got very excited by the rare large flowered bee orchid:

The large flowered bee orchid, Ophrys magniflora

We didn’t see any snakes during the week but we did see several species of lizard, including these amazing Moorish geckos which looked like mini crocodiles:

The ends of their toes were flattened against the wall:

We also found these sweet little parsley frogs, and this one required moving to safety:

Many invertebrates were seen, photographed and identified over the course of the holiday but I include just two species of spider here because this post is already getting rather long:

*Philaeus chrysops* is the largest and most beautiful jumping spider in Europe. They are called the most beautiful not because of this rather dowdy female, but because of the males who have wonderful red and black abdomens

This is a Napoleon spider because the black markings on her abdomen are said to resemble the silhouette of Napoleon wearing his iconic hat. The females come in three colour forms – yellow here, but also bright red and startling white, enabling these spiders to hide in a range of different flowers

We very much enjoyed our exploration of Languedoc, and the week spent with a group of interesting and like-minded people.

A view of the pinkish waters of the salt pans. A lot of salt is produced along the Languedoc coastline

Kite surfing at La Franqui was terrifying to watch. I had no idea they went up that high

We drove back up through France, this time spending only one night halfway up the country in the fortified town of Langres. The Hotel de la Poste is apparently the oldest hotel in France and, although we have stayed there several times before, it has to be twenty-five years since we were last there. The hotel is the whole of this building and its eccentric roofline is very memorable: