The squall only lasted a few minutes.
Enough to frighten the Farlouse Pipit, these small brown passerines with striped plumage, which Jean-Noël Rieffel, ornithologist and author of In Praise of Birds of Passage
(Les Équateur),
was spying on this October morning .
The rain and wind that lash the island of Sein, this rock lying off the coast of Finistère measuring less than a square kilometer, now gives way to a few rays of sunshine.
On one end of the moor, in front of an embankment, a pair of Barnacle Goose found refuge.
“They have been here for several weeks,”
he whispers, crouching down, while snapping a few photographs of these little geese with white, gray and black plumage.
They are migrants
who come from Scandinavia, from northern Europe.”
Like them, every autumn, hundreds of species of birds stop off on the Breton island before migrating to southern countries to find a suitable climate for feeding.
In their wake, every year ornithologists from all over the world come to explore the Breton islands (Ouessant, Sein) with their binoculars.
They mingle here with some 250 Senans.
“
Each small square meter can accommodate a rare bird,”
says Jean-Noël.
To bird
is to sieve the bushes to detect the glint of a wing
Jean-Noël Rieffel, ornithologist and author of “In Praise of Birds of Passage”
Since 2007, with his group of friends, all amateur ornithologists, it has been the same ritual: getting up early and going to bed late, counting the migrants and hunting - they say tick - the rare bird.
Let's be precise,
"the "tick" comes from the habit adopted by observers of ticking on a list of birds (generally in their favorite guide, the one that never leaves them) all the names of the species seen at least once in their lives”
, informs a specialized site.
“It’s a more exhilarating reading of the world”
In the footsteps of these observers, a world that we thought familiar turns into a permanent wonder.
A bush stirs and a black redstart points its beak;
pebbles rub against each other, a horde of stone turners work hard to roll pebbles to find their food;
a slight noise emanates from a fallow field at the foot of the lighthouse, it is a pygmy bunting perched on a low wall chirping.
“
Birding
means passing the bushes through a sieve to detect the glint of a wing
.
The emergence of a grace,
describes Jean-Noël Rieffel.
It’s making the world less banal and less vague, by detecting the undetectable.
A northern finch call in a stream of chaffinches.
The tiny in the essential.
It is ultimately a more exhilarating reading of the world, a
major “mode”
against a minor life.”
Le Figaro
followed these ornithologists who share, for a week, much more than the love of birds.
Find our video report above.