Читать книгу Walking in the Dordogne. 35 walking routes in the Dordogne - Sarlat, Bergerac, Lalinde and Souillac онлайн

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The Dordogne river used to be alive with trout, salmon, eels, pike, bream and the rarer turtle, but now, due to repeated over-fishing, sewage and insecticide, numbers have diminished. Recently steps have been taken to remedy this, and hopefully numbers will increase again. The rivers and streams are also the home of water birds, and wild ducks, coots and moorhens nest in the reeds and marshes. You will often see herons watching for fish, standing on one leg in the shallows, and if you are lucky, you might catch the blue flash of a kingfisher as it skims over the water.

Birds are everywhere, even in the vineyards where the red-legged partridge has made its home. In the woods and fields are pheasants, woodpeckers, thrushes, robins, nuthatch, blackbirds, coal tits and other common species, as well as woodcock and nightingales. Above the rocky cliffs of the Dordogne, cruising the thermals, are buzzards, black kites and peregrine falcons, the latter re-established only in the 1980s. The cliffs are riddled with the nests of colonies of swallows, swifts and sand martins, especially along the Vézère river, and the dank, dark caves, once the home of primitive man, now harbour thousands of bats.