June 1 was another beautiful day, and one that would turn up far the rarest bird of our entire tour. We enjoyed yet another lavish breakfast in the hotel

then set out shortly before 8:00 for the Petite Camargue–the somewhat misleading name for what are the largest surviving reedbeds in all of France. The short drive out (everything on this tour is surprisingly close to Arles) was uneventful, until, that is, our first couple of Hoopoes led us into a neighborhood just off the highway.

We see many more, of course, on most days of the tour, but there’s something about hoopoes on tv antennas that just screams Mediterranean birding!

We got to the reedbeds and discovered that they were higher this year even than most, a bit of a frustration as we tried to see singing Great Reed Warblers and such. But by continuing south on the fishermen’s road out of Gallician, we eventually found a few openings where we could see in. We stood on the roadside and watched Great and Little Egrets, Gray and Purple Herons, and all the usual wonders of a big stand of reed; a lone Squacco Heron flew past, giving frustrating views (we’d make up for it later in the week, in spades), and the 15 or more Glossy Ibis that passed as we watched were a very good showing for this expanding but still rare invader.

And then from Marty came the fateful words. The rest of us swung around as if one body and got the scopes on two Purple Swamphens, an adult and a juvenile. They were visible on the edge of the reeds for a couple of minutes, then drifted back into the dense vegetation, never to be seen again. I’d never seen this huge, colorful rail in France, and while I think they’ve been seen annually for some years now, they’re never predictable outside of Spain. Bird of the day, possibly even bird of the trip for me!

Scamandre and its restrooms were closed (they’re now open only Wednesday through Sunday, it turns out), so we wandered a little ways down the road to a well-known White Stork nest, occupied by big, nearly flighted chicks.

I don’t know whether this was the mother or the father, but a second adult stork soaring high overhead was almost certainly the other parent. We ended up seeing three occupied nests this time, including one I hadn’t known about, found by Sue in the eastern Camargue. Great to see this splendid bird doing so well!

Our closest restroom possibility was Aigues Mortes, so we zipped down to that weird twelfth-century fortress.

Once a major port city, Saint Louis’s town is now a landlocked anachronism, and perhaps the more fascinating for it.

We wandered for a bit, enjoying both the historic side of Aigues Mortes

and its lively but somehow still tasteful tourist offerings.

And speaking of tasteful, our lunch at Le Duende, on a quiet side street just down from the church where Louis and his crusaders took the cross 750 years ago, was one of the best of the tour.

After lunch we drove north back through the Petite Camargue, looking to no avail for the swamphens; good luck, good timing, and Marty’s great eyes had come together in what appeared to have been a unique conjunction. On to St-Gilles, another important site in the history of the crusades, its west front often credited with the most beautiful Romanesque sculpture in France.

We “read” the iconography together, but what sticks most in my mind is how obvious the line of descent is from the early Christian sarcophaguses we’d seen in Arles the day before to the stately frieze figures here at St-Gilles.

A further hint of twelfth-century authenticity was added by a new mammal for the tour list:

The distant ancestors of this Black Rat, busy under the foundations of the church, no doubt stowed away with the pilgrims and crusaders who passed through St-Gilles in their thousands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We gave this one and its friends a wide berth as we crept up the narrow alley on the north side of the church!