Birding France – Birding New Jersey

April 24, 2018

Crossing the Gard

It’s not an hour’s drive to the Pont du Gard, one of the most famous Roman structures in the world, but the rocky banks and garrigue of the river Gardon are a world apart from the marshy lowlands of the Camargue.

We spent a bright, warm morning here admiring both the acumen of the Roman architects and engineers and some pretty exciting birds. As usual, getting out of the parking lot proved our greatest challenge. A pair of black kites was busy building a nest in one of the big poplars, and the first of the day’s several common redstarts hunted the fenceline. The distant song of a golden oriole was simultaneously encouraging — they’re back! — and tantalizing — way back over that way! — but soon enough the bird, or a bird, flashed across the clearing to land in the bare branches of the kites’ home tree: great views of a bird that so often goes barely glimpsed even where, as here, the species is so hearteningly common.

The water was notably high this time. Several of the old familiar gravel bars were nearly submerged, to the disappointment of a pair of little ringed plover flying ceaselessly just above the surface of the river. My guess is that they had lost their nest, or at least their anticipated nesting site, to the flood. One or two more were on the rocks on the far bank, but unless water levels fall, there may be no breeding here this year.

reat cormorants, white wagtails, little egrets, and gray herons looked happier. If they were content, the alpine swifts and crag martins were exuberant, flashing above and around and through the arches of the aqueduct. We saw several martins at their nest crannies, while one pair returned persistently to a damp spot on the steep bank, whether to bathe or drink or gather a little mud for the nest we couldn’t tell.

We had just time for a quick glance into the woods, then it was time for a good lunch at the Terrasses. House sparrows and western jackdaws were our companions, and a blue tit working the edge of the terrace was a “lifer” for some of us.

We were back at the hotel in time to take an hour’s break, then most of us set out to have a look around town. St-Trophime seduced much of our attention. It is impossible not to linger at the Roman sarcophaguses repurposed as altars, especially what may be the most famous example in France, the Sarcophagus of the Red Sea.

From here it was up to the arena, then some were off to gape at Frank Gehry’s new Luma. I decided to work up an appetite for dinner by putting my feet up and listening to the black redstarts, common greenfinchs, and Eurasian collared doves out the window of our hotel room.

This is the life.

April 24, 2018April 25, 2018

Into the Camargue

This turtle dove — one of several we were lucky enough to run across today — was tired after the long Mediterranean crossing, but our little group was full of energy and eager for our first excursion into the Rhône delta. We left Arles in a dense overcast, which gave way to warm sunshine as the morning went on, even heat in the late afternoon.

It was stop and go, in the van and out of the van for roadside birds, until we got to the shores of the Etang de Vaccarès at La Capelière, where it seemed as if every step was interrupted by something new: white storks on nests, gangs of greater flamingos honking on the ponds, a flyover by the first European bee-eaters of the trip. It would have been almost too much, if there were possibly such a thing as “too much” for birders.

The wide-open flats of the Fangasser, just to the south, were every bit as good as we’d hoped they would be. Kentish, little ringed, and black-bellied plovers gave beautiful looks, though we could only imagine what nifty rarities must have been mixed in with the clouds of dunlin overhead. Common greenshanks were scattered everywhere, while dense flocks of pied avocets were wading and swimming through the deeper water.

Of all the fine birds of a very fine place, I still think of the slender-billed gull as the Camargue specialty. These dark-billed beauties are, happily, much more common than they were even twenty years ago when I first birded their out-of-the-way haunts, but it is every bit as exciting today to see “snouties” as it was back when they were a mild rarity.

It was already time for lunch, so off to Salin de Giraud just down the road, with a pause along the way for a nice close look at a short-toed snake eagle.

Of the dozen birding spots between there and Arles, we chose the Verdier marshes at Le Sambuc to walk off yet another good meal. It was hot, well into the 80s F, and not much was stirring. Our first purple heron was in the ditch, and common cuckoos, common nightingales, and Cetti’s warblers — nearly all of them characteristically invisible — provided a classic Mediterranean soundtrack.

Tomorrow: the cliffs of the Alpilles.

March 13, 2015March 29, 2015

Birds and War: A Hundred Years Ago Today

There is a vast, entirely unmanageable literature by and about ornithologists in the First World War. Even that heap of letters and books and articles and memoirs, though, cannot possibly make mention of all the millions who died while the larks trilled above the trenches and nightingales chanted from forests stripped bare.

Instead, we’re left to remember only the famous, among them Wyndham Knatchbull-Hugessen, killed in action at the age of 29, early in the course of the British offensive at Neuve-Chapelle.

Knatchbull-Hugessen had rejoined the Grenadier Guards on returning from a collecting trip to the Neotropics, part of his work with Charles Chubb on what was to have been a monumental, 16-volume survey of the birds of South America.

The first volume appeared in 1912, but on Knatchbull-Hugessen’s death three years later,

so little text had … been completed, and the work as projected was so extensive and costly, that nothing could be done in the way of completing even a second volume….

As often happens, however, the preparation of the text and the painting of the illustrations had proceeded at different rates. The artist, Henrik Grönvold, had made somewhat better progress, and in 1915, the publishers determined that the finished images should be issued even in the absence of the intended text. H. Kirke Swann provided brief descriptions for each of the 38 plates, which included ratites, tinamous, cracids, and a selection of water birds and waders.

Those plates would not be the only ornithological monument to Knatchbull-Hugessen. In 1916, Chubb proposed a new genus name for the spot-throated hummingbird, Brabournea. The name — later shown to be invalid — honored his late co-author, Knatchbull-Hugessen, the baron of Brabourne, killed in France a hundred years ago today.

November 19, 2014June 23, 2019

The Day the Magpies Died

Who can keep track of the quarrels and tussles between England and France and Burgundy in the later Middle Ages? All those Louises and Henrys and Charleses and Philips have always run together for me, even back in the days when it was my job to help others keep that sort of thing straight.

One story from that tumultuous time (you didn’t think I’d get through this without saying “tumultuous,” did you?) has always shone bright in the distant mirror, though: the slaughter of the magpies in 1468.

That was the year when Charles the Bold maneuvered Louis XI (known to his many friends as “The Universal Spider”) into turning over much of his territory in the Lowlands and abandoning his allies from Lüttich. The treaty sealing Louis’s humiliation was signed in the northern city of Péronne and ratified in October by the French parliament. According to the historian Louis Roy (no relation to the arachnid),

the inhabitants of Paris, given as they were to independent thinking and a constant spirit of mockery, taught their birds to whistle the word “Péronne.” The birds learned so well that once he had returned to his capital, the king could not walk the streets without hearing repeated on every side “Péronne,” the name of the city that brought back such unpleasant memories.

Louis did the only thing he logically could do: On November 19, 1468, a decree went forth confiscating “any magpie or jay able to speak the word Péronne or other such fine vocables.” Convicted of lèse-majesté, these “singular prisoners of the State” were — so says Louis Roy — summarily transported to Amboise, where they were massacred at the edge of the forest.

The shameful Treaty of Péronne was abrogated two years later. It was too late, though, for the magpies of Paris and their voluble kin.

June 28, 2014June 20, 2014

Bacmeister at War

The world changed forever 100 years ago today, and not for the better.

How to trace the cataclysmic fall of western culture without trivializing the deaths of so many?

Let’s try looking at the wartime career of a birder, namely, the jurist and amateur ornithologist Walther Bacmeister. Bacmeister was sent to the field at the age of 40, and served in the German army on both eastern and western fronts. In October 1916, he sent a poetic greeting, entitled “Draussen und Drinnen,” to his colleagues attending the annual meeting of the German Ornithologist’s Association:

For two full years, long ones and difficult / Our iron-hard defenses have stood armed out here. / They are defending our dear fatherland, / surrounding it with a bronze cord. / Two years, and if it lasts that many years again, / All you enemies will still not attain your goal! / We stand firm in the howling of the storms, / We out here.

As the months come and go, / you at home have not been idle, / You have served, hardy, in silent strength / German science. / Keep building that proud firm structure, / Let it rise high into the blue of heaven, / And crown its cornices in spite of our enemies, / You in there!

After the poem was read to the assembled guests, Anton Reichenow led the cheer for “our ornithologists dressed in campaign gray.”

Reichenow and Bacmeister and most of their colleagues were on the wrong side in a war that didn’t have many right ones. As an officer, Bacmeister had a modicum of leisure to pursue his own interests, as when he was stationed in Strasbourg in spring 1917:

Whenever possible, my time off duty was used for ornithological observation…. When in the early morning of April 27, 1914, I rode through the lavish brush of the Rhine woodlands on the northeastern edge of Strasbourg, I thought to myself that this was a real willow tit landscape. Hardly had I had the thought when I heard the familiar and characteristic “däh-däh,” which I had heard many hundreds of times before in Poland and in northeastern France — in the Argonne, the area of Verdun, and Champagne.

Infamous names in the history of European slaughter, rendered harmless by the presence of a gray parid.

Otto Kleinschmidt, the best known today of Bacmeister’s ornithological friends, provided the best account — nearly in “real time” — of Bacmeister’s collecting activities in the field. In an essay entitled “Miscellany on the Birds of the Enemy Territories Occupied by Us,” Kleinschmidt reported that

The first war souvenirs for my collection were two strikingly gray crested larks from the District of Warsaw. They were followed by both willow and marsh tits, collected on the triumphant march from the Beskids to Brest-Litovsk. The kind donor was Bacmeister…. On January 20 I received my first French willow tit, again from Captain Bacmeister, who had meanwhile returned to the western front after the conclusion of the Serbian campaign. Now shipment after shipment came in from east and west alike. None went missing — this must be emphasized, to the honor of our field post offices — and no bird arrived in unusable condition…. A magnificent series of “war birds” was assembled…. Collecting proceeded according to a system, namely, the focus on material that would be most important for the comparison of the Russian and the French avifaunas.

In the course of a rare leave from the front, Bacmeister was also able to hand over to Kleinschmidt specimens he had collected earlier — meaning, I think, before the war — in France and Poland.

Kleinschmidt commemorated his gratitude to his friend and colleague in the name of a new race of the lesser spotted woodpecker, collected by Bacmeister in the Ardennes in March 1916.

Two males and one female are much more heavily marked than German, English, or north African specimens, such that this is the darkest European form…. I name these pretty birds Picus minor bacmeisteri.

Kleinschmidt and Bacmeister together described another new taxon from birds collected in the Ardennes and Argonne.

Some of the long-tailed tits of eastern France have reddish upper eyelids in spring. Most are smaller than the subspecies europaea….

They named those birds Aegithalos caudatus expugnatus, “captured in battle.”

In his published writings, at least, Bacmeister appears to have thoroughly enjoyed his war. In a summary of ornithological observations made in eastern Poland, he recalls that

after the happy conclusion of the Easter battle in the Laborez valley in spring 1915, my division and I crossed the ridge of the eastern Beskids…. We passed through all of Galicia from south to north. Unforgettable days! We and our Austro-Hungarian allies had taken back Przemysl and Lwów. As if enchanted, we wandered after many months of spare living through the streets of Lwów, which were thronged by happy, festively dressed people. A joyous welcome was prepared for us.

Bacmeister found his time in the “magnificent city” far too short, but

still it was enough time to pay a thoroughly enjoyable visit to the splendid collections of Count Dzieduszycki, none of which — this must be emphasized — had been damaged by the Russians. It was a great pleasure for me to write my name into the guestbook directly below the names of the Russian visitors. Times change!

Only rarely and incidentally do grim realities intrude:

I encountered considerable numbers of barn swallows in virtually every village and town. In many places their nesting locations had been destroyed by the war. We learned that the Cossacks had sent special troops to burn down the villages that they had occupied and then been forced out of; those troops went from house to house and set the thatched roofs on fire with torches. The fires spread quickly to the entire house and left not much more than the chimney standing. From September 8 to September 21 I encountered migrating house martins.

Unlike so many millions, Bacmeister survived the Great War and returned to a prosperous and busy life in Germany. His family was not so fortunate the next time around, however.

On October 13, 1949, Bacmeister — by then a retired state’s attorney in Stuttgart — wrote to the president of the German Republic, Theodor Heuss, with “a request that is not my request alone, but shared by many who share my same grief.”

Our only son, Arnold Bacmeister, married and 42 years old, a lawyer, has been a prisoner of war since May 1945. He was a paramilitary soldier in Berlin. For three long, long years we knew nothing of his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive. Then, in August 1948, we learned from three separate returning prisoners that he was still living: He was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp [which had been transformed into a prisoner of war camp by the Soviets after its liberation by the Americans], where he most likely still is, if he hasn’t been sent somewhere else. He knows nothing of our condition or that of his wife, and cannot write; neither can we. This is psychic torture, for him and for us, and we can hardly bear the agony any longer.

Heuss replied, five days later.

Obviously, as you know, the power of the president is limited, and many Germans still live in the belief that all the head of the federal state needs to do is give a directive; they do not understand his authority and its complications. That dreadful fate that finds Germans still captive in the concentration camps of the eastern zone is well known to me from a long series of cases. The delicate position of the German Federal Republic with respect to the reconstruction of eastern and central Germany makes any concrete confrontation politically very tricky. Protest against this situation has, of course, already been registered by all parties. But I will be glad to take your letter as the occasion to raise this matter with Minister [Jakob] Kaiser.

The editors of Heuss’s official correspondence fill in the rest of the story: Bacmeister wrote to the president again in July 1950, after learning that his son had been sentenced to 18 years of prison. Arnold Bacmeister was released sometime between 1955 and 1957; he would publish an autobiography two years before his death in 1994.

Even through those excruciating years, the elder Bacmeister continued to write about birds and birders, ornithology and ornithologists. The family history mentions more than 240 (!) publications, most of them on natural history. He published biographical sketches on Theodor Heuglin (of gull fame) and the great Chilean explorer Christian Luis Landbeck. Of greatest use to the researcher is his bibliography of ornithology in Württemberg through the year 1943,

What are we to think, almost 50 years after his death, of the life and career of Walther Bacmeister? He was a loving father and a member of the Nazi party. He was an ornithological historian and an officer in the armies that devastated northern France.

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

: Wikimedia Commons