in minnesota (where i usually reside for any new visitors to this blog), is not someplace where flowers of any variety begin to bloom in november.  there is a roundabout on the outskirts of Béziers (where i currently and temporarily live, for those same new visitors to the blog), that is our gateway to anywhere we want to go along the meditnerranean coast of languedoc. in other words, we use this roundabout a lot. so when i spied these poppies this week, i knew they had not been there previously, and had just bloomed within a day or two. that is to say: in mid-november! it is only coincidence that this same week brought the first significant snow to minnesota. only coincidence. it means nothing.

california poppy (pavot de californie)

béziers, languedoc, france

as a sort of time capsule to commemorate some of the wildlife sightings we’ve had here, i’d like to draw attention to these hedgehog spines, left in little clumps on a boulder, where we believe a local raptor called a buse variable ate a very careful and tentative meal. the other night, climbing to an out of the way restaurant in the forested hills behind our village, we saw a creature disappear into the brush by the side of the road, sporting a racoon tail, but much longer than a raccoon’s. it turns out that was a genette, known in English as a genet, a sort of cross between a racoon and a lemur. joe currently has a terrarium where he is undertaking the care and feeding of our pet praying mantis. we watched a wild boar hustle across an open field toward cover last weekend. on the way home from barcelona, we looked down onto the etang de leucate and watched flamingos browsing in the shallow water near shore. and, though it didn’t happen this trip, but rather in the summer of 2014, we did have one of our most thrilling wildlife sightings of all time here–a hoopoe drilling for worms and grubs with his long curved beak, in the middle of the road, near one of our favorite vineyards. when the kids were little we always read them wildlife and animal books, and the hoopoe was one of those mythical animals, like a black panther, that everyone always dreamed of seeing in person someday. not to mention the fact that it has the greatest latin name of all time: upupa epops. just saying upupa epops in our family could stop tears, fights, temper tantrums, and misunderstandings. it was like nighttime triaminic cold cough and flu medicine. it just made everything peaceful again. thank you, hoopoe, for your preposterous name.

european hedgehog spines

autignac, france

left to itself, that stone is just a stone, with a little white scar from some flaw or former hurt. the vine is just an aimless twig. together, they are a couple. ok, an odd couple.

striped beach rock and driftwood

plage du lido, sète, languedoc, france

my 13 year old joe has worked his way through all of gerald durrell’s natural history adventures in corfu, and just began listening to e. o. wilson’s letters to a young scientist. he is suddenly on fire for science and biology, and after three months of having to pry him from his iPad, the difference is profound and heartening to his mother the scientist, and his father the reader/writer. today in a fit of daring and curiosity, he wrote an email to the professor emeritus of the entomology department of montpellier university asking him to help identify two insects joe had collected and couldn’t identify. we tried to prepare joe for the possibility that the professor emeritus of entomology at montpellier university might not have the bandwidth to reply to questions from a 13 year old american. approximately an hour later we received a reply from the professor, who identified both bugs, thanked joe for his interest in entomology, and directed him to a website where he might inform himself further on the arthropods of mediterranean france. i share this not to draw attention to what might, in the end, be a fleeting distraction in the arc of joe’s life. but as a way of praising the spirit of science, which tends to breed people like a professor emeritus of entomology who has time to share his strange and obscure intellectual passion with a 13 year old foreign stranger. although i accept that the quick response could also be due to another facet of being the professor emeritus of entomology: you don’t get a lot of fan mail.

three languedocien acorns: white oak, holm oak, kermes oak

autignac, france

these mushrooms formed a little wandering path through some dense thicket, in the shade of a grove of parasol pines. i don’t normally respond to gnomes and fairies and sprites and dryads, but i squatted down to look under the brush at this little line of stepping stones, and i have to say i wanted to imagine some tiny creature bounding along the forest floor from one mushroom to the next. the feeling will pass.

dried funnel mushrooms

autignac, france