Jun

Birds and Art in Provence: Looking Ahead to 2010

There’s no real way to sum up a tour as good as this spring’s Provence trip. The birding was great, the food was if anything even better, and the participants are all my friends now. Writing about the trip on the b-log and in my formal tour report, I felt nearly as sad at the end of my prose as I had at the end of our ten days!

Every tour, of course, leads to revision of the next, and the new itinerary for 2010 includes two significant alterations. I’ve removed Ventoux from the tour; though birding there can be good, I’ve now had two years of absolutely lousy weather up there, with snow in 2008 and rain in 2009. The only halfway reliable species we give up is Citril Finch, which showed reasonably well this year–and was found only on the scouting days in 2008.

And our day in Avignon, delightful as that town can be, is going to be replaced by visits to some of the Van Gogh sites around St-R émy, itself a wonderful medieval village with plenty to do and see. Unfortunately, none of the artist’s works is exhibited anywhere near our tour route, but we can see the hospital where he was admitted after that awkward incident with the ear, and many of the famous views he painted are still available, virtually unchanged a century and a quarter later.