i spent three months in bretagne last year, from mid-spring to mid-summer,
and it's unfortunate that most of the better birding (from my perspective,
anyway) occurred much further north (ie, the UK) during those months...
even so, if you are into northern gannets, common guillemots, razorbills,
eurasian oystercatchers, varieties of cormorants (including the english
shag), and atlantic puffins, the tour boat out of perros-guirec (northeast
of lannion, northwest of guingamp) goes to les sept iles regularly and
inexpensively... if i remember correctly, there were breeding gannets in
early july numbering well over 40,000...

other interesting birds seen during that time were wagtails (yellow, grey,
and a citron), european herring gulls, black-headed gulls, and great
black-backed gulls, jackdaws, common shelducks, blue tits, common swifts,
northern house-martins, mute and black swans, grey herons and little
egrets... most of these will be found within 30 miles of the coastline,
though my favourite for many was either my front porch (in the town of
pedernec) or anywhere from tregastel to paimpol... perros-guirec is as good
a place as any for the egrets, the shelducks, and all of the gulls...

to throw you off completely, you will also see canada geese and mallards
and, if you are lucky, dunlin... my best catch was a lesser kestrel;
common kestrels can be found almost anywhere, but photographing them is
another matter...

my travelogues are online, and detail what was seen, when, and where...
send me interest, i'll send you the links... oh, and if you speak or read
french, there are a few semi-decent websites dedicated to regional avians :)

00 caren
http://www.parkgallery.org
george davis creek, north fork



-----Original Message-----
From: tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu
[mailto:tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu]On Behalf Of Mark
Egger
Sent: Wednesday, 2007 April 18 17:00
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Tweeters] RFI: birding in France & N. Italy


I know this is way off-topic and would be better addressed to a
European bird list-serve, but I highly value the opinions of my
fellow Tweets, so here goes. My family and I will be visiting France
(mostly the NW coast in E. Brittany, the Dordogne region, and
Provence (including the Alps) and N Italy (Tuscany, Umbria, and a bit
of Venice). We will be there from late June through most of July,
travelling in the order listed above. While I've birded fairly
extensively in North and South America, this will be my first trip
out of the New World! Can't wait for my life Stock Dove! :-)

I am interested to hear from anyone who has travelled in these
regions at that time of year and can suggest some awesome places to
maximize numbers of species within a relatively few locations
(neither my wife nor daughter are terribly into birding -- one too
many sewage lagoons, I fear). I have already discovered the Camargue
area in Provence, which seems to be the Malheur NWR of France, and
the Maremma region in Italy, but I'd still love to hear other's
thoughts, recommendations, strategies, etc. Please reply directly to
me, unless you think such info would be of interest to the group.
Speaking of field guides, I took Dennis Paulsen's advice & picked up
the recent "Birds of Europe" by Mullarney et al. -- which has VERY
nice plates (I keep staring at the beautifully executed Sylvidae
pages) and has a lot of information packed into a fairly small size.
Any recommendations for a supplementary guide and/or a good source of
voice recordings? I do so much of my birding by voice here, and I'd
like to study up aurally on the European species, so I'm not
completely overwhelmed.

Thanks much in advance,

Mark
--
Mark Egger
Seattle, WA
USA
mailto:m.egger at comcast.net

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