Réserve Naturelle de la Truchère- Ratenelle

La Truchère - the lake

Our photo club in Cluny came with a proposal to organise an outing to La Truchère. La Truchère? Yes, La Truchère. We had no idea what on earth was interesting about this village, so we decided to look it up in Wikipedia and Google Maps. La Truchère appeared to be a small village on the East bank of the Saône near Tournus, there where another (small) river, the Seile flows into the Saône.

La Truchère -swan

The only other things La Truchère has on offer are a church built in 1830 and a tiny little mooring place for small pleasure boats, neither of them very photogenic. We had no idea why the club had chosen this place for an outing.
Upon inquiry we were told that, smack in the middle between two villages, there was a Nature reserve called Réserve Nature de La Truchère-Ratenelle, where one part with sand dunes, marshland and peat district is in la Truchère, the other, with a lake, marshland and peat district, is in Ratenelle.

La Truchère -swan

The area is known to be home to some interesting birds, among others the purple heron.
We should have known better, and not go to this bird reserve completely unprepared. We have not the foggiest when birds are breeding or when they migrate, etc., and apart from that we have not got a zoom lens sufficiently strong to shoot some nice pictures.

La Truchère -swan

The chances that we would return with some spectacular bird pictures was in any case nil. An extra drawback was, that due to the extremely long and dry summer the water table was also extremely low. This of course did not add to the picturesqueness of the place.
Irrespective of this I managed to shoot some acceptable pictures, albeit not of exotic birds, but of everyday swans, and who knows, maybe we will have more luck next time….

La Truchère -swan

Bambi, in person

Ferme Apicerf

Through a Photo Club we joined some time ago we heard that there should be, somewhere near Cluny, a deer park. Just before we joined, the club had organised an outing in order to do a photo shoot. We often see roe deer around here, sometimes in a meadow, but more often when they cross a road through the woods in the vicinity. In this case however the animals, as far as we could judge that, were a herd of red deer.

Ferme Apicerf

We know Cluny and surroundings quite well, but we had never seen something resembling a deer park. One of the members of the group gave an indication where we had to look to find the deer. That appeared to be in the woods just outside Cluny, and they belonged to a farm called Ferme Apicerf. The farm was not difficult to find, but there was no trace of any deer. Another phone call gave us some more information; the deer were to be found in some fields much further away from the farm building then we thought.

Ferme Apicerf

On our second quest we found some fields, where the gate bore a sign saying Ferme Apicerf. In the fields we could also see some beehives (apis = bee in Latin, cerf = deer in French). Further, the fields were surrounded by fencing normally used around fields where farmers keep sheep. And when we looked even better we saw in one of the fields, at the edge furthest away from where we stood the herd of deer we had been looking for. Unfortunately they stood in the shade of the edge of the wood and the distance was too big to take some decent pictures (even using a 300 mm zoom), but we will certainly go back there when the circumstances are better.

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