The stony plains of La Crau, a scant half hour east of Arles, are on of France’s most unexpected landscapes, more like the flats of Spain or the steppes of eastern Europe than anything else.

The birdlife at the Peau de Meau preserve is also steppe-like, with regionally significant populations of birds that are rare or non-existent elsewhere in France. We missed the sandgrouse this time, and the only “good” falcon we encountered among the abundant Common Kestrels was a surprising male Merlin, its gray back good for a moment’s hope…. But we did have excellent looks at singing Greater Short-toed Larks, and Hoopoes and Turtle Doves lined our walk along the canal before we set off across the cobbles to the blind. A single male Little Bustard hopped up out of the grass at one point, but only his head and neck were visible by the time the others, having availed themselves of a rare shrub, caught up.

The blind itself is actually the room above the sheep pens in the barn, pleasantly warm if slightly aromatic; I was impressed to see the signs about closing doors and windows in Provençal. A Southern Gray Shrike perched on a post just out the window, giving us with the Woodchat Shrike we’d seen on the way in a two-laniid day, not a usual occurrence in western Europe! And a pair of Eurasian Thick-knees, or Stone-curlews as I learned to call them, alternated between shocking conspicuousness and absolute invisibility against the streaked and mottled background of the stones.

(They’re not actually in this photo, but they might as well be, beautifully camouflaged as they are!)

We returned to St-Martin for lunch, but stopped at the Ecomuseum first, where every birder new to France has to have his or her photo taken under the world’s largest hoopoe.

Our tour of Mediterranean France was billed as birding and culture, and to restore the balance, we spent an entire day in Avignon, the medieval city of popes and anti-popes. It was nice to sleep in a little–museums don’t disperse to feed at dawn!–and the short drive from Arles to the site of the “Babylonian captivity” was relaxed and pleasant.

Parking, of course, was less so, but we found spaces (free, no less) for both the vans, then gallant David had to help a young woman squeeze her car into a space that she found intimidatingly narrow; she was grateful, and he was rewarded with a kiss and the applause of the participants.

Meanwhile I was holding one of my deadening dissertations on the history of medieval Provence, and had just reached the bit about the papacy in its 14th-century exile when a colorful parid appeared over our heads: “The election of the anti-pope led to the Great Tit, um, Schism….” Good for a laugh, and we passed through the walls at the Gothic church of St. Agricol and headed to the Palais des Papes.

The Avignon popes built this, the largest Gothic building in the world, around what was already a lavish episcopal residence, and it is a sight to behold.

Even on a weekday in April, the place was crowded, but it is so vast that we found it easy to slip the gangs of schoolchildren and enjoy the elegant spaces in relative tranquility. What everyone really wants to see, of course, are the rooms decorated with Giovanetti’s frescoes, but as always, I found the stripped-down walls and high vaults of some of the empty chapels and meeting rooms more moving.

Too soon it was lunchtime, and we took our noon meal (well, our 1:30 meal) in an outdoor cafe beneath Avignon’s best-known tower.

We had missed the performance of the clockwork automata,but the food was good and the people-watching equally so.

We split into two groups after lunch, one bunch headed to the park above the papal palace, the other to the museum housed in the Petit Palais (modestly so named only in comparison to its extravagant neighbor across the square). The exhibits include a nice selection of architectural ornament from Avignon, none of which photographed well, and a number of galleries representing Italian painters imported by the popes and anti-popes in the fourteenth century. It would be a fine place to go back to time after time, but a single afternoon’s visit tended to make all the madonnas look inevitably the same–except, of course, for this one, painted by a young Botticelli.

Older and pleasingly a bit plumper, the same model would rise from the waves later on as Aphrodite.

We reconvened under the clock tower for some picnic shopping, and the more equestrian-minded among us took advantage of one of the more charming features of every Provençal city, the 19th-century merry-go-round with its painted ponies and trompe-l’oeil caryatids.

As wonderful as the Petite Camargue and the coast at Stes-Maries are, there is always a special excitement in birding that narrow tongue of marsh and farmland between the Etang des Vaccarès and the Rhone. This was the destination for the longest birding day of our tour, thirteen hours that passed like an instant and left us wishing–almost–that the food were not so good and the pillows not so soft back in Arles!

We started the morning at La Capelière, the major visitor center in the eastern Camargue, where a pair of White Storks was already in attendance at their huge nest.

Old nests of this species are notorious for harboring other species, and Western Jackdaws and House Sparrows were busy in their own little apartments in the lower layers, while a Gray Heron spent most of the morning perched nearby in the tree, no doubt envious of the fine structure the storks had inherited from generations of their ancestors.

The walk around the trails was bird-filled and beautiful, and the first blind gave us stunningly close views of Spotted Redshank and the only Green Sandpipers of the tour (Wood Sandpipers were much more abundant, reflecting the late date, I suppose). Oystercatchers are also a feature here, along with an impressive density of obstreperous Black-necked Stilts, rivaled only by the Flamingos in their outlandish proportions.

Water Rails were nearly as noisy, squealing and groaning very near the blind, and the fortunate and the patient among us got close views of a pair moving through the reeds and cattails.

This is also one of the best areas of the Camargue for raptors, and we had our best views here of Western Marsh Harrier, powerful, almost buteo-like wetland predators quite unlike their “long-winged” congeners.

A fine surprise was a Short-toed Snake-Eagle perched on a pole across the marsh, its huge head bringing to mind an outsized owl. This or another bird soared over us later in the morning, too, providing a greatly appreciated lifebird for nearly all the participants. (A French birder we ran into later in the day had had no fewer than 5 individuals of this species in the afternoon!)

The inevitable consequence of birderly exhilaration is birderly hunger, and we enjoyed a fine picnic Provence-style at the shaded tables of the visitor center.

This was, no exaggeration, the best meal I had ever had “in the field,” and not just because of the food and the great company: Common Nightingales and Cetti’s Warblers sang to us from the tangle, Flamingos honked and Black-winged Stilts yapped overhead, and a lovely little male Pied Flycatcher saw to it that no ants disturbed our repast.

A pause for Little Grebe, actively and frustratingly diving on a roadside pond, and then it was off to Salin de Badon, my favorite spot in the eastern Camargue. It had grown warm, and some of us opted to wait in the comfortable chairs at the gites, where they enjoyed more Nightingales and Chiffchaffs while others of us set out along the trails to the justly famous blinds. Sardinian Warblers and Common Nightingales were common in the low shrubs, and a nice variety of herons was in every ditch and weedy pond. We were after shorebirds, though, and the show from the Coot Blind was very good, with several score Black-tailed Godwits loafing and bathing, a flock of 80 or more Ruffs, a dozen Pied Avocet, and the trip’s only Common Snipe all easily seen. In the distance was a surprising gang of some 40 European Spoonbills, making us wonder whether the species, usually so rare in the Camargue and usually found only in winter, wasn’t breeding somewhere in the area. A young French couple who had followed us into the blind pronounced the birds “préhistoriques,” as good a description as any for a bird that always looks like it has stepped out of an overly imaginative museum diorama.

The afternoon was coming to an end, forcing us to turn back towards Arles. We stopped on the way at the Grenouillet, where a distant pair of Little Ringed Plovers played on the drying margins of the lake, and a dashing European Kingfisher, well, dashed past us along the canal. One of the highlights of the trip was a light-morph Booted Eagle perched here on a tall tower while Common Buzzards, Kestrels, and Black Kites passed overhead. Common and Gull-billed Terns were on the nearby rice paddies, but the marsh terns included only (only!) Black and Whiskered.

Our final stop on a long and birdy day was the Mas d’Agon, where we were surprised to encounter two other parties of birders, friendly and helpful. At least 4 Squacco Herons were hunting the edges of the ponds in the fading light, and a Northern Lapwing passed over and landed on a newly plowed field, filling a gap for those who had missed the species earlier in the week. We were tired, we were hungry, we were happy, and we returned to Arles just as the sun of Provence was setting over the rooftops.

Ever since Ludlow Griscom’s visit to Les Stes-Maries at the end of the First World War, southern France for American birders has meant first and foremost the Camargue, that fine (if dwindling) complex of marshes and salt flats in the delta of the Rhone River. And the Camargue, of course, means Greater Flamingos, 20,000 or more of which breed each year on a single inaccessible island–and spend their days feeding on roadside ponds and puddles.

But there’s much, much more out there, and our group spent parts of three days exploring the nooks and crannies of what remains, development and drainage notwithstanding, one of the most exciting birding areas in western Europe.

We divvied up our time between the Petite Camargue in the west, the area of Saintes-Maries in the south, and the marshes on the east side of the giant Etang des Vaccares.

The Petite Camargue, just south of St. Gilles and its splendid defaced Romanesque sculpture, is especially good for herons, and the morning we spent there gave us a list of no fewer than six species: Gray Heron, Purple Heron, Great Egret, Little Egret, Cattle Egret, Squacco Heron, and Great Bittern–the last, as too often, just a voice (but an imposing voice!) from the reed beds of Scamandre. Somewhat surprisingly, we did not encounter Black-crowned Night-Herons until our final day in the Camargue, and even then only two individuals of what I think of as a fairly easy bird there. It was especially exciting to see so many of the herons in their nuptial prime, particularly the Little Egrets with their long, fine ponytails blowing in the breeze.

That breeze was daunting at times, and our visit to the Digue de la mer at Stes-Maries was downright stormy, the wind and rain coming off the Mediterranean making it almost impossible to bird even from the lee of our vans. It was hard on the birds, too.

But we persevered, ultimately finding that the same winds keeping us inside were keeping birds on the ground where we could see them. A loafing flock of larids just off the causeway included a dazzling variety (particularly for those of us from Arizona!); among the white dots were Little, Black, Whiskered, Common, Sandwich, and Gull-billed Terns, along with Yellow-legged, Black-headed, Mediterranean, and a half dozen fine little Slender-billed Gulls, that last a species we saw nowhere else on the tour.

Waterbirds are the stars of the Camargue, but it is a wonderful place for landbirding, too. Barn and Bank Swallows by the hundreds were moving over the Petite Camargue the morning we were there, and among them we found a single Red-rumped Swallow, my first ever in France. Cetti’s Warblers and Common Nightingales taunted us from every bush and thicket, and even in the wind at Ste-Maries Linnets and Western Yellow Wagtails were conspicuous in the reedbeds. And it was there that a Woodchat Shrike, the first of a heartening three that we would see on the tour, surprised us as it hunted the salicornia flats in the same stiff winds that had blown it across the sea from its wintering grounds in Africa.