[obol] A little out of area: Impressions from a week in rural France and how it might relate to Willamette Valley vineyards
- From: Joel Geier <joel.geier@xxxxxxxx>
- To: Oregon Birders OnLine <obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, MidValley Birds <birding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:36:03 -0700
Hi all,
This is wandering a bit afield, but it was interesting for me, and
hopefully for a few of you as well.
I spent the past 10 days in France -- four of those days in Paris and
Lyon, which I would not recommend for birders, but the other six days in
the Haute (Upper) Marne region which I would gladly spend another six
years exploring.
My visit was focused on the hydrogeology of this karstic region, where
whole rivers disappear into limestone sinks, and then later reappear --
perhaps even in a different valley. In this environment, and in our
modern interglacial climate in which permafrost regions have retreated
far to the north, rainwater tends to sink straight into the ground,
creating perfect conditions for a grassland. I thought that I was back
in North Dakota, except that the road signs were all in French.
A long while back, I stopped keeping track of my life list, whether in
Europe, North America, or elsewhere. I've spent perhaps 10% of my 50
years in Europe so even when I visit, "life birds" are rare. However,
most of my time has been in the Nordic countries, and I've never spent
significant time in SW Europe at the peak of breeding season.
So it was fun to see some birds that I've never seen before such as
Little Grebes, tending to their young on a river that I was tracing from
source to finish, alongside of Gray Wagtails which I've seen only a
couple of times in Sweden, picking food out of a rushing flume that
probably dates to Gallo-Roman times.
A little side note, the Swedish name,Forsärla literally means
"rushing-stream wagtail."
Somewhere I've seen a quote by a famous physicist to the effect that if
you know the name of a bird in all of the languages in the world, you
still know next to nothing about the bird. That is incorrect, even if it
comes from a very smart guy who knew a lot about subatomic particles.
If you know the name of a bird in all of the languages of the world, you
can start to understand how different people in different cultures
perceive the same birds. That accumulated wisdom sometimes tells you a
few things about the bird.
As a simple example, Russians on a train crossing Siberia will point out
a raven as "varon" while crows are "varona": little ravens. Swedes love
the name "skata" which as a single word applies strictly to magpies, but
in a more general sense applies to any bird that makes harsh calls such
as the "Snow Magpie" or snöskata (more properly Björktrast or Birch
Thrush, known to British birders by the name Fieldfare which presumably
represents the expected habitat where they see these birds in winter).
But I digress, and then I digress from the initial digression as well as
the secondary digression ...
While meandering through the uplands of France last week, the main thing
that I noticed was an impoverished assortment of birds, despite that we
were in one of the more diverse agricultural regions with wheat, barley,
corn, rapeseed, and the occasional herd of Charolais or Holstein cows.
As bad as that was, things got a lot worse when we dropped down into the
heart of the "Champagne appellation region" along the lower Marne River,
where vineyard spray rigs were nearly as numerous as passenger cars from
the wine tourists who flock to this region.
At most stops I could pick up a Chiff-Chaff singing from the nearest
riparian patch a couple of kilometers away, but when we stopped in the
middle of vineyards, there was an astonishing stillness even compared to
the wheat & rapeseed fields higher up. There at least I'd hear a few
Song Larks and see a few old-world warblers dropping down into the
fields from nearby forests and brush. But the industrial-scale vineyards
in the heart of the Champagne region were simply silent.
The expanding Willamette Valley wine industry tends to be well received
by birders, since -- let's face it -- most of us like to drink a glass
of good wine now & then. Vineyards also score much higher on the
coolness index than, say, grass seed farms or dairies.
However, if Oregon's wine industry expands to a scale similar to the
wall-to-wall grape situation that I witnessed in the Champagne region,
my hunch is that we'll be seeing a lot fewer birds in the Willamette
Valley.
Good birding,
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
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