A few evenings ago Simon called out to me 'Quick! there's a huge moth in the laundry. Get the camera!' My first thought, if it was really huge is that it would be a Convolvulus Hawk Moth, especially since one had leapt out of my swimming bag when I opened in the changing room a few days earlier. It must have been on my towel on the line, got folded up, and only escaped when I unzipped the bag.
But it turned out to be a red underwing moth, and subsequent requests to mothing friends indicated that it was specifically a French Red Underwing Catocala elocata (Fr. la Déplacée).
French Red Underwings are found in central and southern Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. They are the biggest of the ten red underwing moth species that can be found in France, with wingspans of 80 mm. The adults fly from July to October, in wooded habitats, including towns and villages. The caterpillars eat the leaves of poplars, or sometimes willows.
This species can be very easily confused with the Red Underwing C. nupta. There is a very good comparison photo and list of characters to check on Lépi'Net if you ever need to distinguish between the two.
French Red Underwings are warmth loving creatures that live along the banks of rivers. But they are very commonly encountered in urban locations too. They will occasionally be attracted by a light, but usually quickly back off and sit motionless in the shadows, exactly as happened in our laundry.
It does not appear to be threatened, as it favours landscapes which are stable and very common caterpillar host plants.
Charles Darwin, that global household name, loved orchids and was intrigued by their many mysteries. He famously predicted that an unknown hitherto unobserved species of long tongued moth must be the nocturnal pollinator of the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, a species with a particularly lengthy nectar carrying spur, endemic to Madagascar.
But one mystery, much closer to home, eluded him, and has only recently been solved. It concerns one of the most common wild orchids in Britain. We get it too in the Touraine Loire Valley but here it is not common, especially in the south where we live. I find it more on our travels especially in the mountains.
What Darwin never figured out was why the Common Spotted Orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii (Fr. Orchis de Fuchs) is not scattered about everywhere. After all, their seeds are nearly microscopically small and can be easily dispersed by the wind. In the end though, it is their tiny size which provides the clue as to why Common Spotted Orchids grow in clumps and close knit colonies rather than in the more isolated and scattered way that one might at first think should be the case.
Common Spotted Orchid seeds are so small that they don't contain the supply of nutrients that the seeds of other plants tend to hold. That means to survive they must fall near enough to their parent plant to latch on to its network of mycorrhizal fungi, which will then supply the necessary nutrients. Common Spotted Orchids can be seen in large dense colonies, but few of the individual plants will be more than a few centimetres from an older, more established plant.
Further Reading: Dactylorhiza fuchsii on Loire Valley Nature
Smoke from the Gironde fires photographed in Libourne when we stopped for lunch in July 2022.
Here are some photos from a walk I took on a fairly hot day in August. It was two and a half kilometres around Chaumussay, and took me half an hour.
European Peacock Inachis io (Fr. Paon-du-jour) and Red Admiral Vanessa atalanta (Fr. Vulcain) butterflies nectaring on Hemp-agrimony Eupatorium cannabinum (Fr. Eupatoire à feuilles de chanvre) by the side of the greenway (Fr. voie verte).
Naturalised apple tree by the side of the voie verte.
Soapwort Saponaria officinalis (Fr. Saponaire), a wild plant once used to make suds to wash hands and delicate embroidery and lace in the Touraine.
The village church.
A charming garden gate, made by Michel for his house in the village.
This rose was feeling the heat.
Public planting at the end of the bridge.
The modern variety of Charentais melon, with its yellow netted skin and green ribs, was developed in the Poitou-Charente area, just to our south-west, in the 1920s, but the original Charentais Melon goes back to the 15th century, brought here by Charles VIII as a prize from his Italian campaign. He had them grown in the Touraine Loire Valley, close to the many chateaux which were now serving as luxury country residences for the King and his courtiers. By the 16th century the court poet, Pierre de Ronsard, was moved to write a hommage to eating melon in the summer by the side of a stream.
Pierre de Ronsard, regarded as "the Prince of poets and the poet of Princes", was Prior of the Priory of St Cosme from 1565 to 1585.
Pierre de Ronsard's private apartments at the Prieuré de Saint Cosme.
Vous qui semblez de façons et de gestesAux immortels, imitant les Célestes,Prenez de moi ces pompons et ces fruits.Les-vous offrant, je ne crains que personneBlâme mon don : car, Sire, je vous donneNon pas beaucoup, mais tout ce que je puis.
A la Reine, Pierre de Ronsard, 1565
As I mentioned on Saturday, last weekend the de Becdelièvre family celebrated 1000 years of living in the chateaux of Boussay. The first hundred years was in a wooden chateau - until the Vikings burnt it to the ground. They rebuilt in stone, and parts of that chateau still stand. A couple of rebuilds and many alterations later and we have the building that exists today.
We went to view the son et lumière on Sunday night. Here are some of the images (in no particular order). They were all taken on my Fujifilm HS10 camera at f/3.6 • ¼ second exposure • ISO 800 • and the camera was hand held.
Gérald's been at it again. More artwork has appeared on the front of his house. He and Françoise live in the house once owned by our friends the Lartigau family, at the top of our street.
Gérald's first artwork on the facade of the house, completed a couple of months ago.
Several generations of Lartigaus had lived there, and they were tailors. When Mme Lartigau died her grandchildren inherited the house. Their lives were elsewhere and they decided to sell the house. Gérald and Françoise purchased, and really we could not wish for better neighbours.
This is what the house currently looks like.
Over the last few months Gérald has been adding artwork to the facade, in a charming acknowledgement of the past. He is well aware of its history, and aware it is a bit sad that the Lartigau family is not there any more. It would have been different if Jean-Pierre Lartigau had lived, but he succumbed to colon cancer in 2011 [here's a link to my obituary of him].
Gérald's latest artwork, completed a couple of weeks ago.
The French word 'rafle' means 'police roundup' in English. Because of its associations with the mass arrests of the Second World War, most famously the Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, it is quite a toxic term.
On 27 July 1944, at dawn, a German task force from Tours, accompanied by Gestapo agents and French members of the collaborationist parties (fascists, anti-semites or anti-Bolsheviks mostly), stormed the sub-prefectural town of Loches.
Memorial plaque to the clerk of the court, one of the victims of the roundup.
Memorial plaque to police officers who died in concentration camps after the roundup.
This war memorial to police officers who lost their lives in the Second World War is in Place des Anciens d'AFN, next to the Agnes Sorel cultural centre in Loches, and the Metropolitan Police Station.
The trouble with honey bees Apis mellifera (Fr. abeilles des ruches) is that they are a bit like feedlot cattle or battery hens in terms of their impact on the environment. They are not polluting by contributing to greenhouse gases or nitrogen levels in rivers but they are intensively managed animals in enormously large numbers that are significantly and detrimentally altering their immediate environment. Yes, you read that right. Many honey bees are not the good guys, but the bad guys in their neighbourhood.
Honey bees drinking in a stream.
So what exactly is the problem? Surely we need all the pollinators we can get these days? -- that's what the mainstream media is telling us... The problem is that most honey bees are managed intensively, which means that there might be millions of them working over the flowers in a fifty square kilometre patch. By sheer weight of numbers they are out competing the dozens of other species of native bees who do not have the advantage of being cossetted and fussed over by a beekeeper, or the social structure which means that a honey bee colony operates like a single gigantic and voracious foraging entity. Bumble bees form modest colonies of a few hundred members at most, and all the other dozens of wild native bee species are operating as individuals, some of which do not fly more than 150 metres from where they hatched, and who simply cannot survive or reproduce on the dregs left to them if there is a group of honey bee hives placed nearby.
Honey Bee on lavender.
Until recently entomologists and ecologists have only suspected there might have been competition for food that was negatively affecting solitary bees, but since 2017 there have been a number of studies, most of them French, which have shown conclusively that honey bees in numbers above about two to three hives (so around a hundred and fifty thousand individuals maximum) are causing a 'halo effect', where inside a radius of 600 metres from the hives, solitary bee numbers are halved. And that effect continues to some extent for several kilometres, depending on how many hives there are.
A swarming Honey Bee hive.
The problem is compounded because honey bees are good at collecting pollen, but not particularly good pollinators, so both plants and solitary bees are losing out. Modern honey bees are about 20 times as draining on pollen and nectar resources as honey bees from prior to the 1950s. This is in part due to modern managed honey bees being selected and bred for honey production. In addition, one of the primary sources of pollen and nectar for bees of all sorts is wild flower rich grasslands, a habitat which has declined by about 90% since the 1970s.
This many hives indicates a commercial apiarist, or a serious hobbiest who has a sideline in selling honey. The position and time of year indicated that sweet chestnut trees in flower were the target. They make a premium honey.
It is for this reason that ecologists are starting to support the idea that hives should be banned within a 2-3 kilometre cordon around nature reserves.
I spotted this unusual hand mill at the annual summer brocante (flea market/garage sale) in Preuilly. I wondered what it was for and asked the vendor. As soon as he said 'c'est pour malaxer le beurre' I knew exactly what it was because I'd seen the process performed in modern stainless steel on video. It is for kneading butter after it has been churned and before it is shaped into pats. An apparatus like this is for the best butter, so the object is rare because not all farmhouse butter producers did a thorough kneading.
It is for working the butter so that the last few drops of buttermilk can be squeezed out, and salt crystals can be added and evenly worked in. The salt will also draw out even more liquid, so that the butter is said to 'weep'. If you want to see a malaxeur à beurre just like this one in action, visit La Maison de Beurre in Saint Malo (Brittany) and check out the very similar machine used by Bordier [link]. A lot of people consider this to be the best butter in the world.
Traditionally these 19th century machines are made of teak, so I assume that is what the wood of this one is.
I can remember my mother making butter, up until I was about 10 years old (ie 1970). After the house cow was milked, by hand, the cream was separated from the milk in a centrifuge with an electric motor housed in a small shed at the bottom of the garden. Then the cream was beaten in the stand mixer. Once Mum had something that looked more or less like butter it was flushed a couple of times with water, then tipped out onto the bench and beaten and squeezed with hand held wooden paddles rather than run through a butter kneader. Then with those same paddles it was shaped into blocks (pats), making sure to give a nice pattern from the ridges on one side of the paddles, before being wrapped in waxed paper for storage in the fridge.
The chateau of Boussay has been lived in by the same family for a thousand years. (I'll just let that sink in for a while.)
They are celebrating this weekend with a series of events:
At the height of the plague we made a video about the village of Boussay, its chateau and church. I drove Susan mad making it, but we're quite proud of it.
One of the many reasons we have to be thankful is for having lovely Franco-Irish neighbours, Anne and John. On Monday John very kindly stacked most of our three tonnes of firewood that had been delivered that scorching hot day. I did half an hour of stacking and probably got about half a tonne done in that time, but it was as much as I was willing to risk in one go, with my torn shoulder tendon. Simon isn't allowed to do lifting and carrying until the end of the month.
John volunteered, and turned up at about seven thirty in the evening so he wouldn't melt. It took him around an hour and a half including raking up all the debris. We are so grateful and a cake is being baked for delivery over the road. John says he quite enjoyed turning a jumbled pile of wood into neat stacks, with the debris in trugs. I say he's a hero.
Most years I go to the summer fete at Séligny (population 250). This is because I have several friends who live there, the natural history association Botamyco37 that I'm a member of puts on a display, and one of the best melon producers in the area sells their delicious Charentais melons at their peak.
This bloke had excellent saucisson, from Maine et Loire to our west. I bought wild boar, wild mushroom and bull.
This year I had lunch with friends Jean, Michel and Michelle. The menu was melon, moules frites and tarte fine aux pommes. Simple and classic.
The Charentais melons on this stall come from a farm just outside the village. I bought three.
My friend André lives in a house on the edge of the village that was his grandparents before him. Everyone in Séligny not only knows one another, but they are related. Jean told me his grandmother married three times, so almost everyone is greeted with 'ah, mon/ma petit.e cousin.e !'. This term is used in French to indicate a familiale link that is not as close and direct as first cousin, but might be several times removed.
The village restaurant.
André informed me that the mussels for the fete menu had been stored overnight in the brook that runs through his garden. He also told me that back in the day, his grandfather used to keep the community oysters fresh in the same brook. But in those days many people's untreated sewage discharged straight into the stream, and André's house is downstream of the entire village...
The remains of our meal.
The menu for the day.
