Wildlife from Wolverhampton and nearby
A minor road by the river in les Eyzies. A common wall lizard was basking in the sun on the wall, as they do. It saw me, but didn’t immediately shoot off to hide in a crack in the wall. It did start to move, but leisurely. Perhaps it realised I wasn’t much of a threat standing still some distance away, but it was getting in position to sprint off if I came closer.
A marbled shield bug poses by walking slowly over the marbled table top on the balcony of the hotel we were staying in at les Eyzies. There were lots of these insects on plants in the area immediately around the village.
These distinctive shield bugs are indigenous to the far east of Asia, but are now well established in western Europe. They have been recorded in Britain, but, as yet, not quite as often. They have also reached the United States, where they are spreading from the east coast.
The table top is marked by what I’m almost certain are fossils. If so, it is not a true marble. Possibly it’s a polished limestone, and just perhaps from a local rock.
ADDED: it seems that while we were away, there have been press reports that this species is poised to invade Britain. From what we noticed of their propensity for fast breeding during a few days of fairly casual observation in rural France, I’m not surprised.
Autumn is the peak time of year for fungi. The hills of the Périgord are well wooded: even the cliffs where they are not too steep. Dense mixed woodland on a limestone soil probably means a rich mix of interesting fungi, including the black truffles which are prized by gourmets. Even in and immediately around the town there were a surprising variety of species.
The most striking, to me, were these dyeballs. From the name, they were a source of some kind of pigment. There are records of them in Britain, but much more common on the continental mainland. These were growing at the foot of the cliff by the railway station road, and a stone’s throw away from the Cro-magnon shelter.
The most famous prehistoric site in the region is probably the Lascaux cave. It’s in the same river valley as les Eyzies, but almost twenty miles further upstream. It’s also been much degraded by what has come to be called overtourism. Large numbers of visitors have severely damaged the paintings on the walls and roof. Tourists now see a modern copy of the cave. Indeed, overtourism has degraded two copies already, so the current attraction is Lascaux IV.
What makes les Eyzies stand out is the shear number of (mostly smaller scale) sites where evidence was found of ice age occupation: hundreds of caves and rock shelters. Many don’t look particularly spectacular. The Cro-Magnon rock shelter looks more fitting as a place to take cover from a sudden downpour than as accommodation, however temporary. But others contain some of the most spectacular examples of prehistoric art which is still visible in its original location. Visitor numbers are strictly limited, some sites are up a long steep path half way up a cliff face leading to caves where the passages are sometimes low, narrow and twisty.
Some sites also have small museums with some of the artefacts they had produced. In the centre of the village (population 809 in 2019 according to Wikipedia) is the French National Museum of Prehistory. A museum of its standard would almost certainly be located in the capital city of any other western European or north American country.
Some of the martins having a final feed before getting ready for the long flight south. They dropped from the cliff face, heading wherever the insects where: over the rooftops, round the jib of a tall crane, or swooping over the river. We arrived in the area on a sunny day in mid-September, when it seemed that most or all of the martins were still there. The next day, the weather started to go downhill at the start of the bout of autumn storms which affected a swathe of western Europe. Now only a few martins were around. I thought they might be ones which had started their journey further north, and had taken the chance of a break and a last good meal.
Les Eyzies bills itself, with some hyperbole, as the “World Capital of Prehistory”. The area is rich in wildlife now, but was far more so during the Ice Ages. As the glaciers advanced and retreated during the cold spells and the warm ones, the local climate alternated between tundra and temperate. As these phases gave way to one another, the area supported herds of many kinds of large mammals, mostly of species now extinct. There were mammoths, bison, reindeer and other deer, goats and horses. In the rivers, there were salmon coming upstream to spawn.
All of these herds survived by making annual migrations in search of the right feeding grounds for each season. The broad river valleys, and especially that of the Vézère and its side streams with their high cliffs to the left and right, funnelled these migrations into narrow channels. The topography was almost as if designed for yet another largish mammal to set traps to hunt for big game.
The first evidence that anatomically modern humans had been alive at the same time as the extinct mammals of the ice age came from les Eyzies. In the 1850s the area got a railway station. Workers building the access road to the station dug up three skeletons in a small overhang in the cliff face. When these were investigated further, they were found to be in the same layers as the bones of ice age creatures. The overhang was called the Abri [shelter in the local dialect] Cro-Magnon. The human skeletons were dubbed Cro-Magnons, the (then earliest known Homo sapiens in western Europe.
Investigations much nearer our own time has shown that there had been Homo sapiens in Africa for many thousands of years prior to the Cro-Magnons. But in the middle nineteenth century palaeontology research was pretty much limited to investigations by western European leisured amateurs in western Europe, with interpretations heavily distorted by the racism of the time. Quite a lot of the effort looks with hindsight like a competition between British and French enthusiasts, each trying to show that their own country had the best survivals of the earliest humans. When the competition had these limited rules, the French won hands down.
Since the uncovering of those skeletons, there have been extensive investigations in the area, which has proved to be incredibly rich in remains from this part of the past. The slew of sites showing human occupation are a record of the presence of what were most likely also migrant bands, not only of Cro-Magnons but also, during the same long ages, of Neandertals.
Crag martins sunning themselves before starting their long migration flight to escape the European autumn and head for an African spring. They are clinging to the face of a limestone cliff, below an overhang, in les Eyzies.
Les Eyzies is a village in the French region which the locals call the Périgord, and those Brits who have a second home there tend to call the Dordogne. It’s in the valley of the Vézère, which is indeed a tributary of the Dordogne river.
The surrounding countryside is attractive. The river is winding, with high limestone cliffs on either side. The cliffs are so steep, there’s a lot of overhangs. Caves can be spotted, some quite high up. So can hollows in the cliff faces where people made dwellings for themselves. Some date back to prehistory. Some were occupied as recently as the 1960s.
The cliffs on either side of the river are hundreds of yards apart. Between them is the flood plane, with the ground mostly rising fairly slowly. That’s where the towns and villages are, with the roads that connect them, and the farmland.
There’s tourism based on open-air activities. Walking on the network of footpaths; cycling on the narrow, winding and sometimes quiet roads; canoeing on the river. Some of the chateaus are massive medieval castles, dating from the time when the kings of England and France both laid claim to the territory.
But none of these is what les Eyzies pushes as its main tourist attractions. More on this, and on the crag martins, in tomorrow’s post.
A tiny frog near the pond in Wightwick Manor garden, trying to look inconspicuous in the short grass by a fallen leaf.
Closing in on a strawberry dogwood in the garden of Wightwick Manor to see the ripening fruit which give it its name.
This green shield bug could have landed more or less anywhere in the garden at Wightwick Manor and been more or less camouflaged against its background. Instead, it was placed for contrast on this fallen leaf.
Autumn leaves so vivid in colour, and so early in the autumn, are the clue that this tree originates elsewhere in the world. It’s a sweet gum, aka liquidambar.
Three large white butterflies were around the same buddleia bush as the red admirals, with several other large whites fluttering elsewhere in the Wightwick Manor gardens. The three spent a little time interacting in flight. It wasn’t clear (at least to me) whether they were jousting for control of territory, or sizing each other up as potential partners.
Perhaps neither. They suddenly broke off, all landing on the buddleia and starting to busily eat from the flowers. Two were even on the same flower head.