Exciting Start To Holiday

This enormous field of sunflowers is the view through our gate and across the track. They still look pretty from a distance although quite a lot of them are hanging their heads now and not so attractive.

Its hard to believe we've been here for ten days now - the time is passing very quickly and our first family visitors have been and gone. The heat wave seems to have temporarily lessened and we've had slightly more comfortable weather and all had a bit more energy, so much so that I felt able to go for a before breakfast "run" yesterday.

Which brings me to the

Big Excitement........



The picture isn't best quality because I didn't get near enough to take the photo without a telephoto lens and it was difficult to hold it steady at that distance and I've enlarged it digitally as well but I think you can see that its a wild boar!!!!

Fortunately I met him very early in my run - in fact only two minutes from the gate - and at first, as I saw him running between the end of the sunflowers and the beginning of the melon fields, I thought he was a large dog - a bit like that devil dog from Ghost Busters. But scary enough for me to turn round and head back for home. Then when I looked again as he was getting closer I decided it wasn't a dog and quickly fetched binoculars, camera and Michael....I've never seen him get out of bed so fast.

What an impressive creature he was although we think it was only a young one. We watched him at a distance for about 15 minutes before he disappeared into the sunflower field.

Although these wild boar are common and hunted in quite a few parts of France our area isn't one of them and certainly none of our neighbours had heard of them being around here. The first one I've ever seen in the wild.

The rest of the wild life photos will be fairly (stuck for a word...can't say tame ...can't say boring...) fairly plain.