Birding Languedoc trip to Les Coussoules, Leucate and La Palme salt pans

The season started well on the 28th March with our first Birding Languedoc outing, and we have several more booked up for this spring.

We started the morning at Les Coussoules, a strip of land with a lagoon behind and the sea in front, where the land is flat and sandy, with sparse vegetation and scrubby trees like Tamarisk here and there. It had been wet so these pools will be dry in the summer; however there are some filtration ponds surrounded by reeds so there are water birds to be found here, particularly in the spring. We were too early sadly for Reed Warblers (they get the Great Reed Warbler here too). No Bluethroats to be seen either, a shame as they were one of the target species and I still haven't seen one properly!

There's a Chiffchaff in the willow tree below; a Willow Warbler was heard too, plus several other birds associated with water, such as Water Rail and Cetti’s Warbler.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

The star of the show down here though was this magnificent Osprey! I have only seen one once before, flying over our car whilst crossing a dam over the Rhone river, with a great big fish in its talons! However that was nearly 20 years ago, so I was more than happy to see this one.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Another lovely surprise was this Common Redstart. The Black Redstarts are common all over France but it's many years since we saw one of these.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Whilst around the filtration ponds we saw our first Swallows of the year, and not just them, but also House Martins, and the first Swifts! Then Sand Martins flew over too, and later in the day, Crag Martins!

Karline, our professional guide, is also a lover of reptiles and seems to easily spot lizards with her specially trained eye! I'd never even heard of this one, it's a Mediterranean species called Edwards Sand Racer (Psammodromus edwarsianus).

Photo credit: Keith Allen

By the way Keith has some new photography kit so I'm leaving the bird shooting mostly to him now, as he's using a 600mm Tamron lens with a teleconverter! He is much more steady than me and I can't cope with the weight of that kind of kit, so I'm perfectly happy with this arrangement. 😀

We then moved on to the Leucate headland, which is an area of garrigue up on some cliffs. It wasn't in our itinerary, however a rare bird had been spotted here in the week leading up to our trip, the Isabelline Wheatear. Sadly not even a twitcher in sight, let alone the bird in question. But I was in my element as I love the spring wildflowers in the garrigue, and loved spotting these gorgeous absolutely tiny narcissus! They are Narcissus dubius, a Mediterranean species that likes rocky chalky soil.

Asphodels were out in bloom too, they are really beautiful flowers.

There are many species of broom which flower throughout the spring, here's one of the early ones, although I don't know which one.

This is looking towards the Semaphore station, but what's that orange thing next to it?

Aha! It's a paraglider and there were several people enjoying the light breezy conditions over the cliffs.

What I didn't manage to capture was the paraglider as well as the group of migrating cormorants which flew towards us along the edge of the coast. Karline of course, identified them when they were just a speck in the distance! I could barely even see them at that distance! 😀

After eating our picnic lunch at La Franqui which is across the water from Les Coussoules, where we saw various other water birds in the lagoon, we moved on to the La Palme salt pans, still on the edge of the same lagoon, Etang de La Palme. Now this is a place that is often full of waders, although mostly they are pretty distant and quite hard to ID, due to their tiny size!

The following photo (taken with Keith's kit) has Dunlins and a couple of Little Stint in the foreground (shorter beaks and smaller). I can actually see better in K's photos than I could with a spotting scope!

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Karline spotted a rarer bird in amongst the little birds, a Temmincks Stint! I couldn't tell the difference, and still can't, but most of them have yellowish legs, though this one seems to have quite black ones. The two birds on the left are Kentish Plovers.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

I love this photo! This was quite a magnicient sight to see, a big group of Flamingos in flight. They are such a weird shape, all stretched out like that!💕

Photo credit: Keith Allen

The following is a list of the birds that Keith and I saw and heard (H), although the list on the BL website write up of the day shows 62 species! Some of those I didn't even see.

Les Coussoules
Green Sandpiper
Buzzard
Common Redstart
Chiffchaff
Zitting Cisticola (H)
Cetti's Warbler (H)
Sardinian Warbler (H)
Coots
Great Tit
Willow Warbler (H)
Black Kites
Water Rail (H)
Osprey
Swallows
House Martins
Cormorants
Swifts
Sand Martins
Marsh Harrier

Leucate cliffs
Sardinian Warbler
Crag Martins
Cormorants (again), migrating

Lagoon at La Franqui
Flamingos
Oystercatchers
Kentish Plovers
Slender Billed Gull
Herring Gulls

La Palme salt pans
Black-winged Stilt
Avocets
Kentish Plovers (again)
Little-ringed Plover
Shelducks
Little Stints
Temmincks Stint
Dunlins
Meadow Pipit
Flamingos (again)

This is the link to the Birding Languedoc write up with photos and bird list.

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Since my last post we have had snow one morning (!!!) and also a few lovely days where we got out and worked in the garden. I hadn't realised quite how weedy my new Nectar Bar bed had got, so I am only about a third of the way through attacking that. It's weird because my herb bed has hardly any weeds; it seems the only things that want to germinate in that clay soil are garlic chives (good!). I think I'll try sowing some coriander and dill seeds in this front bed as the soil is much lighter and it seems everything germinates!

P.S. I actually wrote all this more than a week ago, but I've been so busy this last week that I just haven't got round to posting it! Some nice weather again so I've been out pottering in the garden and getting some natural Vit D. 😀