Poles and Eagles

We had coffee last week with an English couple we know, who live in the hills above Mollans in a house with clear views over the garrigue to Mont Ventoux, splendid this year with a thick covering of snow. It may come as a surprise to know that there is skiing 50 kilometers or so from Avignon, but Mont Ventoux is 6,200 feet high!

This year the last stage of the the famous cycle race, le Tour de France, finishes at the summit of the mountain, where that great English cyclist Tommy Simpson died during the 1967 race.

Anyway, we were there to look at the work that two Polish artisan brothers had been carrying out on the exterior of our friends' house, with a view to getting the them to visit us and quote for some work we needed doing. This was duly accomplished as the work was good and reasonably priced. We await their quote!

Having finished this ,we were drinking our coffee and admiring the view, when a very large raptor flew over us, no more than 30 feet from the ground!

Identifying birds in flight is notoriously difficult and can, at times, appear to be leading to divorce, but we were pretty certain that it was a golden eagle; the sheer size of the wings held relatively straight, the dark underbody, the lighter chestnut on top and the way it was quartering the ground at a relatively low level. The short-toed eagle which we see frequently, by comparison, glides with wings slightly bent, is lighter beneath and hovers, like a giant kestrel!

The golden eagle really was a magnificent sight. It reminded us of when our children were younger and we always passed our summer holidays on the west coast of Scotland at Sanna Bay, with our friends Hazel & David and their three children. One day David, his son Robert and I climbed Ben Laga. The guide book said that golden eagles could be seen, but we took that with a large pinch of salt!

However, when resting on the summit, we heard the screaming of gulls coming from the south over loch Sunart, and approaching us was indeed a golden eagle, mobbed by angry gulls. The beauty of the sighting was that being above the eagle, we were looking down on it and could see so clearly the golden feathers at the back of the neck that gave it its name, a view I had never seen before or since.

A Company of Hawfinches

On the old cherry tree we hang many birdfeeders the year round. The staple food is sunflower seeds with peanuts (difficult to obtain here in France) and fatballs.

They attract many different birds - all the tits: blue, great, coal and long-tailed; nuthatches, chaffinch and greenfinch and treecreepers. Many of the sunflower seeds fall to the ground, where they attract, in the winter, siskins and serins, bramblings and goldfinches; sometimes there are 75 to 100 birds foraging on the ground.

Early this year we were delighted to see first one then two pairs of hawfinches as regular visitors to both the feeders and the ground beneath. Very well turned-out birds; to us, they give the impression of having just left the hairdressers, with not a stray wisp or feather out of place. Both pairs are frequently seen on the tops of the high oaks in the garden, their size (for a finch) and enormous beaks help identify them.

This morning, Jo, my wife, called out to look under the bird feeders, where there were at least 20 hawfinches eating the sunflower seeds!

All the information we could find suggests that hawfinches are shy and difficult to see; one of the websites did suggest that as well as birds that stay in one locality, other hawfinches migrate south from north and east europe in winter and back again in spring.

We assume our company of hawfinches was a party moving back to north and east Europe.