Trip to the Camargue – March 2017 .

We went on a weekend trip to stay in Arles and go bird watching as Spring just started in the South of France. We stayed in a beautifully converted ancient Inn in the old town of Arles and very close to the Roman amphitheatre. It was nice too to see the links to the wonderful paintings that van Gogh produced here before his mental health truly broke down.
So this trip was not just about bird watching but also about the many other attractions too.
In terms of nature – we had two very specific goals – both designed to provide Alla with great opportunities to hone her skills as an inexperienced but fast learning wildlife photographer with a great eye for composition born from her experience as a talented artist and painter.
These were respectively to try to capture images of an Eagle Owl from a reliable site where a pair have regularly been seen at dusk as the evening light begins to fail on an outcrop of rock. We duly took up position - but as night began to overtake dusk – we gave up after two hours having drawn a blank. However – the evening was far from a waste of time. When do any of us just sit – as we did that early and balmy Spring evening – entirely quiet but comfortable on a broken bough of a tree in an abandoned and overgrown olive grove and intensely concentrate on all that happens around you for a couple of hours. It was a wonderful time to observe so minutely the way the evening drew in over the olive grove and surrounding rock formations and how the light changed. It was very close to meditation somehow and intensely relaxing.
Our other goal was to photograph the Greater Flamingos that populate the Camargue.
To get the best possible shots we chose not the heart of the Camargue but rather the industrial wasteland  close by Port Louis at the very mouth of the Rhone delta region. This partially derelict abandoned land reminded me of bird watching at Teesmouth  close by the closed steel works at Redcar and the wading birds that throng to the mudflats of the River Tees estuary.
The benefit of going to Port Louis was that the tarmac roads still exist to get really close to the birds and this made an ideal platform to take some excellent shots in lovely Spring sunshine.
A fabulous time in every sense!