Thoughts

This post has been brought by the “How's this for a holidays trip?” department.

End of April, my girlfriend and I went on holiday to the Alsace region in the North-East of France for a few days. Overall, we found it to be a magnificent region, even without the typical Christmas magic and its associated markets.

Chapter I: The preparation

The preparation tasks were carefully divided: my girlfriend, who had already been there during Christmas, prepared a list of locations to visit, and I supplemented it with natural parks and birds.

As usual, we used oiseaux.net to research the regional birds, and after a few hours, we chose the one we wanted to photograph: the Eurasian golden oriole. With its vibrant colors and shy nature, photographing it felt like a challenging goal, especially given that it was still a bit early for all specimens to have migrated from Africa. We even trained to recognize its singing to improve our chances of finding one!

Coincidentally, the day before departing, we met a painter at Run For Planet Bordeaux from whom we bought a magnificent golden oriole wood painting. Hopefully this would give us good luck for finding a living one!

Chapter II: The voyage

And so, armed with my Canon 5D Mark II, my Sigma 150-600mm and two smaller objectives, we finally departed from Bordeaux.

In the first days, we sightsaw the smaller cities of the region: Ribeauvillé, Kaysersberg, Riquewihr, and some others. Riquewihr was definitely our favorite. There, we found two particularly interesting things to write about.

First, we visited a huge, perhaps the largest of the region, Christmas-themed shop that happens to be open all-year long. The cozy ambiance and the large variety of products, colors, and styles would make even the most avid haters of Christmas love it.

Second, the city had many birds flying around, supposedly due to the historic half-timbered houses and the plants crawling those.

On the houses and hiding in plants, you could see birds commonly found in urban places: sparrows and blackbirds. You may have to zoom in to see some of those in the photos!

Flying in the sky, you could see dozens of swallows going to and fro their nests at high speed. At the moment, I did not have my telephoto lens, and we chose to comeback later. However, when we came back two days later, the nests had been removed from their lodgings, and although we could still see the birds flying, they were too far and too rapid.

Not too far away, you can find the Mont Sainte-Odile and the Hohenburg Abbey on top of it. Together, they create a magically relaxing ambiance where one could spend hours looking at the surrounding forests or reading a book, or, maybe better, my blog!

The place has large surrounding forests, and thus, many birds jumping from one branch to another, the most popular specimen found there being the Eurasian Chaffinch.

Finally, the penultimate day was the most interesting for birding. We went to the Delta de la Sauer nature reserve (the French Wikipedia page details better the hosted species). Before detailing the experience, let me warn you to prepare yourself if you go in the morning, as April's temperatures can be quite low in the region.

The reserve hosts many species of birds, and although we could hear singing and chirping, it was often difficult to see the birds. Sometimes they were too far, sometimes they were too high, but I did photograph some on a few occasions: an European Goldfinch, a Great Spotted Woodpecker, and a Eurasian blue tit.

The goldfinch and the woodpecker were minding their own life and didn't seem bothered by my presence, maybe because I was at a distance of around 17 metres. The blue tit, on the other hand, was very curious and tried to approach me cautiously. The photograph shown below was taken at 23 metres of distance.

Chapter III: Conclusion and missed bits

In the end, as you can see (or rather, not see), we did not find the golden oriole, but we visited amazing places and shot beautiful photographs.

To be honest, we missed some parts of our travel. For instance, we completely missed the Route des Vins, even though we tried many things: going to the beginning and following signals, ask an LLM for a stop-decomposed route, etc., but ultimately all failed and we only saw roads and deserts. Therefore, our to-do list in Alsace is still far from empty, and we should go there again in the future.

Bonus: Fast forward a week later, my girlfriend was in Toulouse and heard a familiar bird singing, so she fired up BirdNET on her phone. It was the singing of a golden oriole. Perhaps a sign that our next holiday should be spent in Occitania?

Thank you for reading. Reach me for further discussion and updates!