In the Field.

Because Deborah has been mainly sleeping for the past 24 hours it has allowed me to go out with Francois, the centre ecologist, and check-out flowers, birds and insect life. I saw some amazing things, including sun-bathing carp rolling in the shallow waters of the marsh, kingfishers like blue lightning flashing through the reed beds, colonies of black kites slowly circling above looking for prey.

Francois most exciting moment was when we came a cross a tortoise. Unfortuneately it wasn't an indigenous species and had probably ben set free there, like an unwanted puppy. It got me wondering though, what bad behaviour warrants relesing a 'naughty' tortoise into the wild? Maybe he jumped up at the dining table too much, or worse than that he bit a small child...hmmm, we'll never know.

I have to say I'm not that bothered about the flowers, but Deborah and I've been put on a project to survey the local road-side flowers. A Rocha hope to harvest the seeds and sow a wildflower meadow, eventually collecting the seeds from that and trialing them on a local landowner's lands. A Rocha's hope is to sell wild flower meadow seeds in the future, so that people like us can be more 'au naturale'.

In practice what this means for Deborah and I is that we go along, find some 'interesting' flowers, photograph them, stake and number them and record their location on a map. Trouble is we don't know our rare specis from our invasive weeds, and all the flower books are in french. So it's all a bit hit and miss.

Here's some pictures to brighten up this post:

A Locust laying eggs & black bulls watching us work.