Another successful visit to La Brenne

EuCAN has just completed another successful and enjoyable working holiday with our friends in La Brenne in central France. Ten volunteers spent eight nights in the municipal gite in Mézières-en-Brenne and worked for five days on several sites in the nature reserve area of La Chérine, reedbeds, woodland, wet pasture and abandoned marlpits.

The hospitality of our French hosts was as warm as ever, we ate delicious local food including pike caught in the fishing lakes nearby and wild boar cooked for us by masterchef Dave Harrop, and enjoyed the fabulous scenery and wildlife. The wintering flocks of Common Cranes are thought to number about 4000 this year – on two magical evenings we watched them (and listened to them) flying in to roost in the reedbeds at the Mer Rouge.

On our final day, we worked with a local volunteer group of French and some British from nearby Martizay, helping to burn up the trees and scrub we had cleared on the fields adjacent to the lake at Le Sous. On December 8th our visit was reported in the local newspaper La Nouvelle Rebublique, with a photo of our group and the local volunteers. Click here to see this.

A selection of photos from the visit is available on our Flickr site .

The bird species list for the visit is here and the non-bird species list is here.

We are hoping to return to La Brenne in 2016 for more!