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