With 241 protected species, the Plaine des Maures Nature Reserve was a jewel of biodiversity in France.
Crossed by fire, it has become a carpet of ashes.
The ocher soil and pink sandstone rocks have given way to a black monochrome landscape.
The songs of birds and cicadas have been replaced by a heavy silence.
Starting from a motorway rest area on Monday, the fire has already burned 6,300 hectares of cork oaks, poplars and many flowering shrubs which dotted the massif and hosted populations of bats, tree frogs and other rodents ....
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In this lunar landscape, about twenty volunteers from the Village des tortues de Carnoules (Var) and the Conservatory of natural spaces in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region set out on Thursday to find Hermann's turtles, a rare species. and protected, who could have taken refuge in the crevices of the rock to escape the flames.
The population of this last terrestrial species in Europe is estimated at 15,000 in the Var, including 10,000 on the Reserve alone.
In sharp decline, Hermann's tortoise, which hibernates by burying itself in the ground, is classified as vulnerable on the National Red List of Threatened Species.
"The turtle is our standard bearer", explains Marie-Claude Serra, the curator of the Nature Reserve, deploring "an ecological disaster (...) unprecedented in France".
"The turtle can fast for several weeks but, on the other hand, the risk is that it will become dehydrated", explains Sébastien Caron, head of the Station for the observation and protection of turtles and their environments (Soptom) in Carnoules where is sheltered the famous Turtle Village.
"The turtle has stood the test of time"
Dominique Guicheteau, scientific director of the Reserve, tries to locate thanks to their transmitter those which would have survived the flames. A beep sounds. He lies down and plunges his arm under a rock where one of them has taken refuge. At his side, a entwined Montpellier snake also protected itself from the fire. The animal with the yellow and black shell, about fifteen centimeters long, is in good health. She is quickly bathed in a basin to drink. Weighed and measured, the recovered turtle is returned to its environment to "avoid additional stress", and will have to wait for the regrowth of thin grasses in the fall with the rain to feed before hibernating.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) this week worried about the consequences for wildlife - desert lynx, Corsican-Sardinian deer, birds, rodents and reptiles - of the fires that are ravaging Russia and the countries of the basin this summer. Mediterranean. In the Var, if a turtle "survived the fire, we can estimate that it will survive", estimates Sébastien Caron, even if it will take more than "thirty years" to know the exact consequences on reproduction. of the species whose longevity can reach 60 years. “The turtle has one weakness: its slowness, but it has been able to resist time,” notes Sébastien Caron about this animal that appeared on earth some 250 million years ago.
A few meters further, a couple of turtles are found under another rock. Covered with earth, it had to find refuge long before the fire to protect itself from the heatwave, observes Sébastien Caron. Not all will have had the same luck, a dead specimen was found this morning. But 31 others were alive. "We went to places where we knew that there was a chance of finding living turtles thanks in particular to the rocks, but this is far from being the case everywhere", nuance Dominique Guicheteau. At the National Nature Reserve of the Plaine des Maures, the search was short on Thursday: in the distance the fire resumed, the volunteers are reluctantly evacuated.