Last year at about this time we were at Arçais for our friend’s celebration of life, a friend who had sadly passed away from Covid early in 2024. Now being on the west coast of France in the vicinity, it seemed a good idea to call in and visit the family home again. Besides, there are a couple of campsites in France that feel a bit like home to us and the one at Arçais is one such.
Before leaving our serpentine site in the late morning, we walked along the coastal promenade in the opposite direction. Here, there were a couple of items of interest. First, there were concrete coastal defence bunkers, one of which was being restored. I’m familiar with the Atlantic Wall developed by one A. Hitler in WWII but I was completely surprised to learn that some of these defences dated from the Napoleonic war around 1810. Others were from around 1900, the only timely reference to which that I could find was the Franco-Prussian war. (Don’t quote me, though.)
More interesting to me and certainly much more photogenic was one of a series of fishing shacks scattered along this coast which would lower large, square nets into the water when the tide was at a suitable height to catch fish, possibly the flat fish that bury themselves in the sandy bottom.
Having had enough of being blown about by the onshore wind, we retired to Frodo to hit the road and make for Arçais about 195kms distant, where our friends lived.
Most of the journey was plain sailing on an autoroute and we made it to nearby Magné by about 13:30 to refuel and fill the fridge with a few days worth of food at a Super-U.
Restocked, we headed the last 10kms or so to Arçais where we reacquainted ourselves with Dom, le guardian, selected a pitch (the same one we’d had last year) and got Frodo settled.
With the sun shining, we sauntered along one of the marais poitevin’s many canals to our friend’s house, hoping that she’d be in. I saw not a single dragonfly – two damselflies but not one dragonfly. In the past, this stretch of water had been richly populated. I’d noticed a seriously reduced population last year but now it seemed non-existent. Our friend, who was in, reinforced our impression by noting that she hadn’t seen any, either.
The catastrophic drop off in dragonfly population has me very confused. This marsh is called the Venice Verte, “Green Venice”, because the water used to be covered in green duck weed. That was when the local sewage system apparently discharged into the various canals. At that time, the area was richly populated by dragonflies. We understand that a “proper” sewage system was relatively recently installed and the waterways consequently cleaned up. The green duck weed has totally disappeared and there is now nothing green about green Venice. Neither is there a strong population of any dragonflies. Now, I’d have thought that cleaning up the water would have improved the situation for wildlife but the opposite seems to have been the case. The insect population has crashed. Consequently, the birdlife which relies on insects for food has also taken a noticeable hit. It’s bizarre.
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