Water bird and History

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Some of the mystery of our black water bird is solved. This morning I caught a glimpse of the bird I had seen accompanied by two babies. JP evidently had seen one of the babies before. I got just a flash of a little one on my video. We’ll look at it tonight on the computer and see if we can get some single photos. We’ve gone to check numerous times since, but no luck. Whoa! Just as I’m sitting in the car next to the upper pond, I can see what looks like a tiny slender duck with an eensy weenie baby swimming behind. The head looks greenish black.  In the sunlight, the mother’s beak looks bright red as JP saw the first time.   We watched them swim along the very edge where the grasses stems are in the water and the video can’t catch them. I’ll see if they come away from the edge to where they are silhouetted. This is likely a different family that has gotten used to seeing a blue citroyen parked above their home.  I wish all you bird lovers were here as this must be a candidate for a lifetime list. I hope Alan knows something about it. When it came out of the water behind the grasses, you could see just its tail flick up and down as it walked. There is definitely white there. We have looked on line at waterbirds of southern France, and Holland, but nothing matches.

This morning I read more of  The Albigensian Crusade book to JP.  Simon de Montfort was the brilliant, charismatic, recklessly courageous, and self righteous leader of the crusaders. His army was made up of mercenaries and volunteers from the north who were promised remission of sins and sometimes land, for 40 days service. So the size of his army waxed and waned while he marched around this huge area taking fortified towns by siege, putting villagers to the sword and burning heretics. Many times a siege had to be lifted because, once saved after the 40 days, large groups of men high tailed it back home in the North. For 6-8 years, the bishops, the southern princes, Peter II from Spain, Pope Innocent III, Simon and Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse repeatedly attacked, plotted, fought, surrendered, changed sides,  preached, grabbed land, made truces then reengaged. One day during a siege of Toulouse, the women were blindly lobbing stones down over the parapet with a trebuchet; one hit Simon and killed him!  We are finding  that his son is not his equal and the French are getting pretty tired of crusades anyway so now things look good for the Southern forces. Unfortunately the last chapter is titled “Inquisition” and that is not going to end well. One illustrative detail: when the feckless Count Raymond VI died, the crusaders, who refused to believe he was a real catholic no matter what he did, denied him a Christian burial and “his coffin stood for many years outside the priory of the Hospitallers while his son begged successive popes to permit his burial in the chapel.  The coffin was still there in the 14^th century (70 years later), but by the 16^th, rats had destroyed the wooden coffin and Raymond’s bones had disappeared.“  Sic transit gloria mundi and “same old same old”.   When we finish this book, we’ll read a Maigret mystery I found in the bookcase.  Time to go to market.

There are a lot of those little bright blue butterflies around. We have a form of one at the pottery and it is pretty worn. So I went to the hardware store, one of those old places with narrow aisles and nooks and crannies, crammed to the gills with one of everything in the world.  John V, you would love it. Sure enough they had a filet a papillon!  We have it here and an empty mayonnaise jar and will await developments. If we get one, I can go to the art store in Gaillac and get a bit of clay for an impression.