I’ve recently returned from a two week family holiday in the south of France. Birding was very much a secondary consideration and July obviously isn’t the best month anyway, so don’t expect anything too spectacular. However, I managed a few decent species so I thought it might be of some interest, particularly as I couldn’t find much information on the areas I visited before I left.
We flew from Edinburgh to Nice with Easyjet and had a hire car for the duration. Accommodation was mobile homes on campsites booked through Eurocamp/Keycamp. We spent the first week at Castellane in the Parc Naturel Régional du Verdon in Haute-Provence and the second week at Vias Plage on the coast of Languedoc-Roussillon, near Beziers.
Our first campsite, Domaine du Verdon was situated about 1.5km west of the town of Castellane on the north bank of the Verdon river. It was a beautiful situation, surrounded by forested mountainsides. Birding in a campsite can be quite good, but often difficult if you don’t want to look like a weirdo peering into the trees above someone’s tent with binoculars. Fortunately this site had some quiet areas, particularly a wooded exercise area next to the river with a couple of fishing ponds alongside. I made a couple of early morning visits to this area and along the river downstream, when I saw very few people.
Some of the birds were familiar, such as the singing Chaffinches and Blackcaps that were plentiful throughout the site and along the river there were Grey and White Wagtails and Dippers (chestnut-bellied). Slightly more interesting fare (for someone from the north of Scotland at least) came in the form of a Kingfisher skimming across the fishing pond and Nuthatches, which were common (and the source of most of the exotic bird calls that I didn’t recognise). A family group of Marsh tits was also something I don’t get to see very often. Downstream from the campsite a footpath led into an area of scrub where I found a pair of Red-backed Shrikes holding territory.
Probably of most interest to a visiting British birder however was Western Bonelli’s Warbler, which was abundant in the woodland surrounding the campsite (similar abundance to willow warblers at home). In the early morning several of these were trilling away in the trees in the exercise area, flitting around in the branches and making flycatching sorties into the air. On one morning while walking past some pine trees among the touring pitches of the campsite I heard a slightly more scolding trill that was familiar, and soon spotted a Crested Tit up in the treetop.
The birds were obviously quieter later in the day, but I did hear the occasional Bonelli’s trilling and a Short-toed Eagle briefly appeared above the hillside across the river one afternoon. We also had a Black Kite fly over the campsite on a couple of evenings.