Birds of Paris!

The Birdwatcher at Bois de Boulogne

Coming down with a cold or flu soon after returning from Paris has done nothing for my good intentions of writing up our foreign adventures. I managed to go to work three days last week but found myself utterly lacking in ambition to do much of anything else in the evenings. Friday I finally took a sick day during which I slept a lot. Even yesterday I was dragging about the house though I did finish reading Jambusters and was moved to harvest more grapes though what I'm going to do with those grapes remains a mystery.

By now the birds of Paris are something of a blur as, indeed, they were, to some extent, while we were there. The thing about Paris, perhaps, is that it's been a city for a good long time and even the designated "bois" are pretty manicured. Oh, there are those who list all sorts of woodpeckers and the like and I swear I did see a streak of a blue bird in flight as we walked through the Bois de Boulogne, but the birds we actually saw clearly and could identify were pretty scant. Admittedly, we spent most of our time in the heart of the old city and certainly we were never out at dawn, or even anywhere near dawn, looking for birds. For a while, it seemed like the only birds we'd see would be in paintings at the Louvre or on graves at Pere Lachaise.

Some bird studies by Pieter Boel

Owl on a tomb at Pere Lachaise

Although of course we saw gulls, including this non-breeding version of a blackheaded gull:

Black-headed gull seen on the Seine and in parks all over Paris

We had some luck at the Bois de Boulogne, though possibly our "wildest" sighting there was the half-naked man sitting, mercifully cross-legged, by the stream that runs through the park. The prostitutes were quite nondescript while the presumed customer was remarkably well-dressed and driving a Jaguar. There are some things I will never understand and, possibly, that I'm not all that eager to understand. Back to the birds . . .

 In the BdeB, we initially saw only the usual pigeons (possibly the exotic-seeming colombe ramier as well as the universal rock doves/pigeons) and crows (again, the latter were likely not American or Northwestern crows but they really could have been) so I was excited when we encountered some European magpies in the company, inevitably, of pigeons.

Tree creeper (!!!)

 Far more thrilling, however, was the tree creeper flocking with some tits. Once we reached the ponds, we found a great blue heron, some mute swans, a great many Canada geese who were joined by some exotic geese I've yet to identify, and some Eurasian coots.

Vacationing Canada geese with some unidentified geese in the background*
Thanks to the collective wisdom of the Tweeters list, I can say that the other geese are bar-headed geese (which are not native to Europe at all)

Eurasian coot adult and juvenile

Molting mute swans

Parus caeruleus, aka Eurasian blue tit, aka the bird I'm looking at in that first photo

It was down from Sacre Coeur and also at the Rodin Museum gardens that we saw some fine, though camera-shy, European blackbirds, while we had to travel to Giverny for what we're calling a bullfinch and some frankly domesticated chickens. **OKAY, we can *call* it a bullfinch but more than a half dozen people on Tweeters are pretty sure it's a chaffinch due to the length of its beak and apparent color of its tail feathers, among other things. I need to get a copy of Birds of Europe. 

Monet's chicken (and above, the putative bullfinch, make that chaffinch)

Access to the colonnade at Parc des Buttes Chaumont was closed so here it is from the ground.

On our final day, at  Parc des Buttes Chaumont, we admired more coots, crows, and Canada geese; some very cooperative great tits; and a wren (Troglodytes troglodyte).

Coot, but is this the same sort of coot as we saw earlier?

Crow at Parc des Buttes Chaumont

Great tit, aka mesange noire

Wren at Parc des Buttes Chaumont (Troglodytes troglodytes)