Return to the Ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes

It's fourteen years since I first visited the Ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, when I was writing The Zoo Father. I used to go there every day then, and first went back last year. There are not so many big cats now – no black jaguar, no pumas, no lions. But there is a snow leopard, as there was then, in the Fauverie. No English word quite captures the French word 'Fauverie'; I've seen it translated as 'big cat house', but fauve means wild beast. In a way it's good there aren't so many big cats because the cages are too small as this is the second oldest zoo in the world, an old-fashioned one. There's more conservation work going on now and the zoo was full of young animals born in the spring or earlier this summer. I saw a young yak, and a Przewalski foal, but the mother was still with her doted companion, a nanny goat, which I must confess last year I mistook for her rather shaggy foal until the horns came into view!

As before, I searched for one of my favourites, the Amazonian king vulture. He's the gaudy headed one below. Twelve years ago there was a baby king vulture in the nursery, in a baby's playpen. As I was wandering around, trying to see as much as possible before closing time, I heard a maniacal laugh and made for the source of it: two laughing kookaburras. They set the macaws off who screeched at each other and started to do acrobatics on their bars. The whole zoo at that point seemed to wake up and become vibrantly alert, disregarding the humans. It gave me a headache as I dashed from one cage to another watching them.

I returned to the little farm to feed the goats prickly leaves. They licked my hands and I stroked their bristly heads and horns. No keepers were there and families were feeding them crackers and bread. One of my favourite paths is along the owl cages. I love reading their names in French as much looking at them. The eagle owl is 'grand-duc'. The great grey owl looked like a ghost from a Max Ernst forest and the snow owl was still there, though I suppose he's a new one. I particularly love his name 'harfang des neiges', though still prefer the English 'snow owl', and the word 'owl' to the French words for owl, good as they are: chouette, harfang, hibou, effraie (barn-owl, screech owl, fright).

 The king vulture. His mate was eating a carcass on the floor.

 The yak mother and son

 Can't remember what this creature was but the three of them were very busy eating rats

 The przeswalski mare with her lifelong companion, a goat.

 Great grey owl

 The kookaburras get going

The macaws listen

 and join in

 Nile croc

Feeding the goats

 Le Paresseux – sloth, in his new rainforest enclosure

Photos of the Marché aux Oiseaux in Paris

One of the things that drew me to write in Paris a second time this summer was the discovery that there is a Marché aux Oiseaux on the Île de la Cité, just behind the esplanade of Notre Dame. It's been there since 1808 and is on Sundays. The rest of the week it's a flower market. Some of the cages have one bird in, others are sadly crammed with budgies, quails, lovebirds and cockatiels.

There were kakarikis – red-crowned parakeets, turtle doves, Japanese sparrows, African greys and many more, even rabbits and three particularly cute black and white rats. They all made quite a noise among the flowers and accessories, the vistas of hanging empty cages for sale. Some birds seemed treated with care, many not. I was there on a research mission but what a feast of colour! I witnessed a few sales. A sudden squawk and a hand was thrust into a cage then out, a tiny flurry of canary feathers dispatched into a paper box and one yellow feather left floating down.

 

Hand-feeding the Notre Dame sparrows

Every time I stay in Paris there are new surprises. One of the highlights of last week's visit was hand-feeding the sparrows in front of Notre Dame. The box hedges on the parvis are bustling with them, mostly juveniles – their breasts and wings still downy. Every day I was drawn back. The first day I just watched as two regulars hand-fed them and a few tourists joined in.  The second day one of the men gave me a handful of birdseed and I stood up on the low concrete wall around the privet and held out my hand. I waited, and quite soon a young female sparrow hopped onto my fingers. Her claws grasped me and she bent down and picked up a seed with her yellow and fawn beak. It took her quite a while to crack and eat it and I managed to glimpse her peach tongue. She stayed on my hand for half an hour, batting off all intruders by raising her wings and fiercely beating them, cheeping at the same time.

The second day I had up to three sparrows feeding together, some fully grown males as well as females and juveniles. The males have darker colouring around their heads, black and brown markings. By this time I'd been to the Marché aux Oiseaux and bought some small wild-bird grains. On the third day (I would pass there on my evening walk after a day's writing) I had six sparrows feeding together, males and females. At one point pigeons landed and starlings. That day I fed the moineaux for an hour and a half, as I was leaving the next morning, to return to London where sparrows are scarce. These pictures were taken on my iPhone with my free hand, though the last six-sparrow day I didn't take any as I wanted to just concentrate on the experience. It was the same with Notre Dame, every time I looked at the cathedral, especially the facade and towers, I saw more. I looked and looked harder.

 The young female who stayed on my hand for half an hour the first day

 Here you can see the beginning of the sending-off display, as one bird starts to raise her wings to beat them at the other.

The man with the black hat is one of the two regulars. They come every day, all day. The other one told me he comes because it makes him feel better when things aren't going well.

The Languedoc, August 2011

I have been visiting the Languedoc Rousillion since I was a child, when my mother bought a steep terraced vineyard near Lodève, with two shepherds' stone huts and a deep banked stream in the sous-bois. We used to camp in the stone huts, after the fire brigade had smoked out the hornets' nests. There are no vines left now but those childhood summers have drawn me back again and again to this wild land with its limestone moors and gorges.

This August, B and I rented a house up the remotest hill of the Orb Valley for one week. The evening we arrived the snowy tree crickets' chirrs filled the house from every window, a sound much like moonlight if it had a voice, more otherworldly than the daytime cicadas, another sound I love. Ours was the last house of the hamlet of Le Lau and the surrounding woods are wild boar hunting grounds. One morning I heard the dogs and hunters capturing a boar; its shrieks gave me a migraine. At night I heard genets, which sound like a cross betweeen a cat and a fox. I saw one darting across the car park when we visited the Gorge de l'Hèric, spotted and with a long bushy tail. On our last night, we heard a boar snuffling and grunting just a few feet away from us as we sat on the unfenced terrace. It was enthralling to be so close but after standing closer to peer at him (he could have charged!) we decided to retreat to safety.

To get to the Gorge du Tarn, Gorge de la Jonte (and its vultures) and the Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux, B had to drive up the Pas de l'Escalette. This is a spectacular pass from the Languedocien plain to the Causses (limestone moors) of the most southerly Massif Central range. The A75 autoroute recently replaced the old A9 road, which we both remember, and that, in its time, replaced an iron ladder for passengers to disembark from their carriages, climb up the cliff, then continue in another carriage. Now, there is a series of tunnels that cuts through then winds round the Steps of the Ladder.  It's only this time that I realised just how much this landscape paved the way for my obsession with Venezuela's Lost World, with its cliff-bordered sky-islands. The causses and gorges were the prototype, so that when I journeyed to the Lost World I recognised it as home, though it plainly wasn't, and is actually hostile in its remoteness and grandeur.

View from the lane above Le Lau across the Orb Valley, early morning

View from Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux

Village of Trèves on the road to Gorge du Tarn

Gorge du Tarn

The medieval and higgledy hamlet of Le Lau from the kitchen door

The sudden storm from the living-room window, thunder echoed around the hills and the wind was wild!

The house from the lane to Le Lau

Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux on the Causse Noir

Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux is just like the tops of Venezuela's plateaus, with eroded rock shapes, though these are limestone and those are quartzite sandstone.

A typical panorama

Vineyards in the Orb Valley, on our way to the Forest of War Veteran Writers

Pas de l'Escalette

Pas de l'Escalette tunnels, no photo does this pass justice. It emerges onto the Larzac Causse, which leads to the Millau viaduct which is 750 metres high and leads to the upper gorges of the Tarn and Jonte.

Research trip to Paris then Languedoc

This Irish pub Finnegans Wake is at 9 rue des Boulangers, about 3 minutes' walk from the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris's Quartier Latin. I have often walked past it down the steep, narrow, cobbled old street, when I used to visit my father and on my way to the Jardin, and chuckled at the pub's name. Later, my father told me that the first place he lived with my mother was in a two-room tiny apartment above it, and that they were happy there. By one of those strange coincidences, I came across a cheap studio room available for holiday rentals directly opposite where they used to live, in 10-12, on the opposite side of the narrow street, also on the first floor. So I've rented it and will stay there one week on 7th August, to research for my novel and sixth collection. 

This is only possible because the Society of Authors awarded me an Authors' Foundation grant. During a hectic teaching week since I heard the news, I have been making plans and bookings. After Paris, I will spend a week in a remote house at the top of a tiny hamlet in the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Languedoc, where I hope to do some more writing as well as exploring.

A Poem for Frida Kahlo's Birthday: Diego on My Mind

Frida Kahlo was born on 6th July 1907 and died in 1954 at the age of 47. Here is a poem from What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo to celebrate her birthday. She often painted herself with a portrait of Diego on her forehead, as in this painting Diego on My Mind.  Here, she is speaking to him and perhaps to herself as she used to feel very alone when he was out with his celebrity mistresses.

Diego on My Mind

Today I chose the ceremonial huipil

with a lace cobweb framing my face.

I have made a fine bed for you

with the white frills of my Tehuana headdress.

And on the counterpane of my brow
           just where the pillows would rest
I have painted your portrait.

All day you keep me company
as I work each gauze bud
into a stiff flower.

You whisper encouragements from the mirror,
nestling deeper into my forehead.

But remember, when you take
          María Félix
                    Paulette Goddard
                              or my sister

to your dirty yellow hotel room,
they lie on my eyes.

My nose smells them.
My mouth stays closed. Every love-cry

is a silk tendril
          quivering in my silent house.


Tomorrow I'm going to Cardiff to the Wales Book of the Year ceremony, particularly thrilled to have What the Water Gave Me shortlisted for this Welsh prize as I grew up there so it feels like my adopted country has adopted me. The UK edition is available from the Welsh publisher Seren and the US edition (just published) from Black Lawrence Press. I'll be giving an illustrated reading from the book at Pallant House gallery in Chichester, 6pm on Thursday 28 July, during their Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition which opens 9th July. Can't wait to see it!