Result!

I mentioned last week that we had been out to look for bee-eaters, without success. Since then S has taken the project seriously, and this morning, following a tip-off from a fellow walker who lives in Fabrezan, he headed out on a mission. An hour or so later he proudly returned ... I knew he'd been successful because he said nothing and got his phone out to show me the photo.

So after I'd cooked lunch (a very nice tomato galette) we went out again armed with the biiiig lens. Finding the bee-eaters involved driving down a dirt track with waist-high grass growing in the middle of it ... clearly rarely used. But once we'd parked it was only a few minutes walk totter over uneven pebbles and ankle-breaking rocks to a fringe of trees and undergrowth along the river bank. A natural hide -- we sat down comfortably under the trees and had a largely unobstructed view of a sandy cliff riddled with holes on the other side of the river. And literally dozens of gliding, swooping, tweeting, perching bee-eaters. It was astonishing. We spent the best part of an hour enjoying the spectacle. Taking photos in flight proved nigh on impossible, but perching ones were a doddle. Sometimes I just sat and watched -- they are such striking birds.

After a while I spotted something else at ground level ...thanks to the long lens I was able to snap it, and later Googling led us to the conclusion that it was an American mink. Clearly a predator of eggs/chicks, because dozens of birds shrieking their alarm calls flocked round it until it eventually plopped into the river.

I'm blipping this photo because I just like the effect of the negative space. It's mightily cropped so not very good quality. Edit: looks better in large though. I've added an extra, and better ones, with context, right from here. I took scores, quite a few of them empty bits of sky that had previously had a bee-eater in them. The birds nest and raise young before leaving towards the end of August, so we'll definitely be back.

Back home we considered whether we would go to an outdoor event in the Val de Dagne. All day the weather forecast has been for a massive thunderstorm and downpour in the late afternoon and early evening. We heard the odd crack of thunder but the sky remained resolutely blue. Eventually we cracked, ordered a pizza, and ate it with a couple of glasses of wine. And now it's raining ... not heavily though.