Green Woodpecker, Estampes

Green woodpeckers are common in France. But not so common that I’ve been able to see one in the ten days that I have been here. And I want to see one. Something about woodpeckers I find fascinating, and the names help. When I saw a three toed woodpecker (really, three toes?) in Maine, I was thrilled. When this past Christmas Peter and I saw a black woodpecker in the forest of Fontainbleau outside of Paris it was the highlight of the trip (not, as some might think, visiting Notre Dame…). So a green woodpecker was my goal for the morning as I rose at 6—the world still dark and quiet—and was out before seven. I walked south out of town, a winter wren singing to me from a bush that has taken over the courtyard of the abandoned house that once belonged to Francine. In the freshly cut field to one side I see a fox trotting my way.  It’s tail is thick, a dark red, lined with brown. It doesn’t see me, so I stand still, and watch. I can tell what route it intends to take, out of the field, across the road and into the corn. So I pull out my camera and wait until it is mid-road. As I snap the photo, he becomes aware I am there, and picks up his pace as he moves into the corn and vanishes so fast.

The sun pops over the hills on the eastern end of the valley and the world is washed in light. The fields of sunflowers and corn look magical, bright. I hear the cackle of woodpeckers in the far woods. As I make my way there, I hear a gunshot from the same woods. It is not any hunting season so I decide that may not be the place to walk. Still, I loiter about on the bridge that separates the Gers from the Haute Pyrenees, visiting with a great tit, and some red tails.

taken with a point and shoot!The return brings me a sparrowhawk in a tree, its long tail magnificent when it flies. And then I hear it, the cackle of a woodpecker in flight. It lands in a tree and I rush my binoculars to my eyes. I see it, green, with a splotch of red on top of its head: my green woodpecker. I can feel my heart race with excitement.

And here’s the strange thing: by the end of the day I will see five of these green woodpeckers. The question is, were they around all the time and I simply did not see them? Or, have they emerged? I think probably the former, how knowing what to look for triggers something in our minds so that we can see it again. I remember when I first followed the call of the great crested flycatcher to find the bird sallying at the top of a tree. After that moment, I heard and saw flycatchers every day, and a bird I did not know,  seemed suddenly a common bird.

I loop up the hill, taking the long way home, and another woodpecker screams overhead, landing in a nearby tree. Also green! I feel as if I have conjured these birds.

I walk the same path I walked last night. It was the full moon, the Sturgeon Moon. At home, I always paddle out into the night on the full moon, and the Sturgeon Moon is my favorite (yes, there’s a chapter in my book devoted to the somewhat hallucinatory experience of paddling the full moon). So a walk through the village would have to substitute for my watery ramblings. The moon shone down, illuminating the rough road, but not bright enough that I could find the owl calling from behind a crumbling house.

Odette and chickenWhen I arrive in Odette’s barn, to say good morning and tell her my woodpecker news (Odette has taken to my birding, giving me tips of birds she has seen), she has a chicken slung under her arm. The chicken has been sitting on its nest, trying to hatch her eggs. Odette is sticking it in a cage—sticking it in solitary confinement as it were—in the barn. The chicken has water and food. She’ll spend two days meditating on her eggs and come out a new bird, Odette tells me. No more trying to hatch them; the chicken will go back to laying.

I wonder when Odette, now 82, will stop tending to her chickens. Last night as we sat outside in the courtyard and ate our dinner of duck confit made by Odette we were all aware that this was the last time we would eat this rich, dense meat. The days of raising ducks, of feeding them corn, then making foie gras and confit are over. It’s just too much work.

One winter I was living in the house and would hover in the barn while Odette fed her ducks. It was an odd, loving process. She would place the duck in a box, its neck sticking out. Then she’d straddle the box and take the duck’s neck in her hands (vegetarians can just skip the rest of this account). She’d talk to the duck, massaging its neck. Then she would insert a long funnel, and grind the corn that would fall directly into the duck’s stomach. In this way, it fattened beyond what is natural. Any stress or abrupt motions might break the duck’s neck. So Odette’s movements were gentle, tender.

That was the case as she stuck the chicken into its cage to relearn its relationship with eggs. She spoke to the bird, reminding it to drink water, to be well.

Wood Doves

girollesThe dirt path through the woods is shaded and quiet. My sister and her family are ahead of me as I poke along slowly, looking for birds and other creatures. I pass the woods where the night before Claude Lucantis took me looking for mushrooms. I have an uncanny ability to find the most poisonous ones. But I did find a few girolles, golden orange, fluted, which we ate in a delicious omelet, and Claude found some cepes, which we fried up with garlic and duck fat.

The dirt path is bumpy and barely used by farmers coming to cut wood. A few open fields deep in the woods are used to graze cattle. The woods are filled with chestnut trees, the green spiny fruit dangling, beech trees, some holly. The land in the woods is often terraced, a reminder that this region was mostly vineyards until phylloxera destroyed the vines in the late nineteenth century.  

Near the house that is now owned by two Dutch women, we turned right. The day before we had visited the women, who have set up shop to make cheese here in this isolated patch of French soil. We had heard of these two for the ten years since they moved in—that they are Dutch is a novelty in an area where the British have come to settle. But more, that they are a couple has pretty much everyone talking. “We’ve seen everything here in Estampes,” Odette says clapping her hands and laughing. But newcomers to the area are scrutinized. Odette knows this as her husband Stanis, came from Polish stock: Baczkowski. She was ostracized from her family for marrying a Pole, who was more French than some Frenchmen.

cepesWhen I was a kid, people would ask to touch me, saying they had never met an American. Those days are over, as the town has seen an influx of many new people. But a few years ago, my Benin-born friend Senami came for a short stay. One night we stayed up late, playing cards and sampling various Armagnac. Around three in the morning we remembered that Senami had agreed to help Odette with her rabbits and chickens in the morning (8 am sharp!). “You have to wake me up,” she implored all of us. “You know I’m representing my entire country,” Senami joked. But we knew it wasn’t entirely a joke.

The one Dutch woman was wearing trendy glasses and almost clean jeans. She speaks both French and English well and told us she was an optician, her partner an architect. “It’s good to do something new with your life,” she said in her lilting accent. This I agree with. But this change of country and of career seemed dramatic. The house they bought had been abandoned for ten years. They wanted something inexpensive, and they found it. Her partner emerged, broader in the shoulders, her short blond hair unkempt, a light powder coating her arms. She was off to feed the happy pigs we’d seen in the fields. We bought a quarter of a round of cheese, and went on our merry way.

Today we didn’t stop for cheese, but rather continued through the woods, the dry, blond soil rutted by tractors. It’s hot out. I lose sight of my companions and at intersections in the woods they put up cairns and sticks as arrows to point me in the right direction. It’s easy to get lost in the maze of trails through these woods.

ladder up the palombiereI pass a palombiere, an elaborate hunting stand in the woods used for shooting the palombe, the fat, blue wood doves that appear in the fall. There’s a ladder made from tree limbs that rises high into the trees—I want to say fifty feet it looks so high. And then a contraption suspended from lines where a decoy balances. It all sits quiet, waiting for the fall hunt.

Earlier Odette had told me about the palombe, and how much Stanis liked to shoot them. They would be in the fields, bringing in hay, when he’d see a flock of doves overhead. “Don’t move,” he yell at her. He’d stop the tractor, pull out his gun and down a few birds. She’d wait for him to finish his hunt. “I was so stupid, standing there in the field,” she laughed. Stanis liked to hunt and had hunting dogs he prized. He went after woodcock, quail, partridge. But he was most excited by the wood dove. Odette tells me that cooked in a little white wine, they are delicious.  

Estampes, part five

Sunday morning. It rained in the night, so it’s cool in the morning when I head out south on the main road, intending to drop down one of the narrow roads that take farmers to their fields. Corn and sunflower fields give over to empty fields, filled with birds lively in the cooler air: the great tit, swallows decorating the power lines that seem to run everywhere I look, tree sparrows.  I flush a pair of woodcocks, who sail off in a flurry of wings. Then I cross a small bridge, and on the other side am in a new department, the Haute Pyrenees. When I was a child, we often walked to the bridge after dinner, hopping from one side to the other, saying, “now I am in the Gers, now in the Haute Pyrenees.” There was no difference, the line entirely political. But we loved it, as we loved those evening walks.

 I look down a narrow passageway, between two corn fields, and spy two fox trotting toward me. They don’t see me right away, so I watch them through my binoculars, their long legs taking light, wary steps. And then they turn sharply and vanish into the corn.

As I near the Boues, the river that carved this valley, the land flattens out. This is an area that Odette refers to as La Plaine. The plains. It is where they grew their hay and wheat. In the summer Becky and I would help Stanis and Odette bring in the small bails of hay and straw. We’d shove in a pitchfork, then in a swoop, lift them above our head to land on the wooden cart pulled by the tractor. Stanis would arrange the bales of straw or hay, as we walked by the slow moving tractor. In the evenings, we’d return home, our hair speckled with straw, straw down our backs and in our bras. And happy.

I come to a stand of trees. I have been hearing woodpeckers on this trip, but had yet to lay eyes on a bird. There was a time when I wasn’t fond of the woodpecker in Estampes, as they drilled holes in our wooden shutters, slowly destroying them.  But now, of course, the woodpecker—a favorite. And there in this small area of dense oak trees, with its bright red flanks is the great spotted woodpecker (wish I had a photo!). Soon after in a field I spy more cattle egret, and one lone grey heron (very much like our blue heron) hunting in a field.

I pass three farmhouses, all beautifully fixed up, new shutters still closed on this Sunday morning. The tractors sit idle; not even the resident dog is there to bark at me as is usually the case. A few collared doves flutter about.

These roads I’m walking are the same roads I taught my niece and nephew to drive on. They were perfect learning roads in that 99% of the time there are no other cars. The downside is that when there was a car, there was little room for two cars to pass. So Alice or Thomas would stop, let me take over the wheel as I inched by the other car. On both sides dramatic ditches threatened to swallow a car.

I spy a hen harrier, grey-white high on a pole, then it swoops off. In a field to my right, a deer, the fifth one I’ve seen on this walk. I have seen deer in the past, but not so many. So the question is: are there more deer, or am I simply seeing them?

My return is quiet until a falcon comes zipping in overhead and slams into a magnolia tree. There’s a rumpus of squawks, then quiet. The falcon got its meal.

And I’m thinking about my lunch as well. So I drive into Mielan, the nearest town to Estampes, where there is a small Sunday market. I tell the melon man from Lectour that I want three melons, one for tonight and two for Monday. He numbers them in black ink so I’ll know which one is ripest.

I arrive at a small vegetable vendor just as he sells off the last of his lettuce. “Come to my house,” he says, “I have lots more lettuce.” So I get in his car and he takes me to his spread of a garden, overflowing with flowers, melons, tomatoes, and lettuce. He’s  retired, so this is a bit of a hobby, but he’s a gardener who likes to experiment. There are some peanut plants he hopes will grow and five corn stalks from seeds he found down by the river. I tell him he should grow sweet corn. He can’t, he tells me. When he was young, he worked inspecting farmer’s milk machines. Often the farmers would invite him for lunch. They would kill a chicken and serve it to him. Sometimes he’d find grains of corn in his chicken (someone should have cleaned their chickens better!). Corn is for chickens, he explained, handing me two large bouquets of flowers: dahlias, marigolds, black eyed Susans, gladiolas.  Flowers, whether in the US or in France, are always beautiful.