Flora et Fauna et Canal du Midi

We’ve been walking the local railway tracks – disused since around the 1970’s but made into public walking and cycling tracks. Some of them are very interesting and go behind farms with crops you can view at close quarters. The other good thing is that you can see a lot of wild nature as you walk past, seemingly unperturbed by humans.

The slugs I’ve already mentioned (see picture), other things we’ve discovered are some lovely flowers which I have no name for, so if anyone out there can help, please do – either Latin, English, Dutch or French name. Actually we found out it's called a Teasel (sp?) used for carding wool - picture under slug pic.

Due to some good detective work I’ve also found out what the seeds are in the poo we’ve been finding. They are a wild cherry – very small – and found all over the place. Something is eating the fruit, pooping out the seeds in large quantities, and the giant slugs seem to be attracted to this. We've been told that it could be foxes eating the cherries but anyone who might know do let us know.

So far we’ve seen 5 snakes – 2 dead, 2 crawling across the path/road, and one dangling from the talons of a hawk about 100 meters in the air. We’ve also seen a few deer around the edges of the forests. Other “wildlife” are the sheep that find their way out of paddocks and onto roads and cows which find their way to local roundabouts and kindly trim any grass or other delicacy growing there.

Some of the roundabouts are interesting – they try to put a theme (usually local) on them, which makes them very distinct. I doubt things like this would survive a weekend in NZ.

We made a trip to some small villages to the north of the Canal du Midi. The Canal looks like it can be a bit of a circus, but if you find a quieter spot, can be really interesting with the comings and goings of boats and barges going through locks – up to four at a time to get to the next level.

There are literally hundreds of hectares of sunflowers ready to bloom – a few are already flowering and are a spectacular sea of brilliant yellow in a green (trees) and brown (barley, wheat and bare land) landscape.

On our way to the Canal we found a poterie in the lower part of the Black Mountains, with hundreds of pieces of pottery of all kinds. We stopped briefly and got away with only a few small purchases – a vase, a casserole pot and two noodle/soup bowls.