Thursday and Friday have been days spent putzing about in relatively brief intervals between showers/downpours. The most productive of our putzes was a trip down to the étang de Cistude just beyond Mézières-en-Brenne. Here there is a boardwalk and pathways…

I think we are destined not to see the Réserve Naturelle du Pinail [Pinail Trail] at its best. We dropped in for our inaugural visit last year and, though we weren’t too disappointed – it produced our first ever Green-eyed…

My fellow dragonfly spotting e-contact lives outside the Parc Naturel Régional de la Brenne but uses it to run the occasional dragonfly tour. So, he’s very familiar with the park and some of its more fruitful locations. He actually uses…

As we’ve learned on a couple of occasions, when you lose friends that have been around you during a visit somewhere, they leave and you tend to feel like Billy Nomates – you might as well leave yourself and go…

Many years ago, I mused about the fact that there was one law in England that you had no way of knowing that you were breaking – the drink driving law. It’s legal to have <80mg/ltr of alcohol in one’s…

In other words, “a disastrous spring?” We arrived here in the Marais Poitevin, just inland from La Rochelle about half way down France’s west coast, on Monday. On Tuesday we went on a very pleasant, mostly sunny 15mls/24kms promenade à…

About 18 months ago, one of my UK dragonfly enthusiast contacts helped me out (not for the first time and certainly not the last) with the identification of a (to me) confusing specimen in France. At the same time, he…

Les tourbières de Vendoire lie in the Périgord vert region, north-west of the gastronomically famous town of Périgueux – truffle country. La tourbe is French for peat and les tourbières are peat diggings. Those near the village of Vendoire were…

We’ve been ensconced here for three weeks now, almost long enough to take root and it’s beginning to feel like home. To be perfectly honest, because we like the place so much and are so familiar with it, it feels…

One section of the GR7 – Grande Randonnée 7, one of the French long distance footpaths – passes along an edge of the farm on which we are staying. This section of the path looks like a good habitat for…