Completely forgot to put in about our 'exciting' evening in the National Park in the sand dunes at Tadoussac - so here it is now for those of you with a birding interest.
We went for a evening/night excursion to the National Park where there was going to be a demonstration of bird bagauges 'banding' or ringing to us. The evening started with a quiz, en Francais complet - in other words, made extra tricky as completely in French. Luckily there was a family from Nice in the south of France whose son is studying at Cambridge and he was able to give a summary translation for us and some American ladies we met in the B&B. Expect the next bird quiz to be in French DB?
If you thought CES in the mud at Kenfig is difficult, putting 75m of nets between boreal forest down a sand dune larger than the front face of the large blow-out at Kenfig with 1 in 2 slope ending at the beach also seemed like a bit of a challenge. There were also rides in the flatter bits of boreal forest. They were trying to catch boreal owls, Petit nyctale and Nyctale tengmalm, using a lure tape. Unfortunately for us the wind was in the wrong direction and the moon was out, so they did not catch any. We had a film of them doing the ringing as a substitute. They take feather clippings for chemical and DNA analysis, so they can tell where the birds they catch orginate. One owl they caught previously was captured one night and recaptured the next night having travelled 150 miles south in that time - pretty amazing we thought. From the video pictures the owls looked very cute. They also told us about the programme they have to re-introduce Peregrine Falcons. Although the owls were not around, the midges were. Luckily for us the American ladies, Carole and Anita, brought some industrial strength midge cream used by the American Special forces, called Xtreme. We'd left ours in the suitcase.
The boreal forests here are not beIng devasted by the Phytophthora fungus, but instead are being destroyed by some sort of moth caterpillar, unfortunately our Cambridge based graduate was an Arts major not Sciences and so was unable to translate that part.
The American ladies were from Minnesota and had been in Tadoussac for a week. The day we arrived they had been on a seaplane over the fjord, and the pilot had let one of them drive the plane, taking photos of her and the views while she was at the controls! She'd not flown a plane before.