In Provence in September, the mistral arrives as a sudden wind from the north, hissing through the olive groves and vineyards and tilting the slender cypresses to angles as wild as any painted by van Gogh.
Vent violent glow the warning signs on the motorways, slowing the lorries imperceptibly but frightening every tourist driver to a tighter grip on the wheel. In the old hilltop villages of the Luberon, doors and shutters slam, and summer grit and dust whirls around the flower-filled balconies and patios.
As a connoisseur of wind, I could quite enjoy the incursions of the mistral at this, its relatively playful season. The dry, chill gusts came out of nowhere, sometimes fading after minutes, sometimes drumming a whole night on the thick clay tiles above my head. In a brief week's holiday, they made an invigorating contrast to the drifting heat of the day.
There was a time when the climate and crops of Provence were so lusciously remote from those of Ireland as to belong to a different world, a Mediterranean Eden. But as global warming moves the climate zones north, vineyards in Co Cork and cherry orchards in Co Offaly become conceivable, while Provence could dry out beyond the reach of the pulsing water-cannon and whirling sprays that irrigate its fields today.
A great charm of the vineyards and orchards of Provence is their trust in the passer-by. An almost total absence of livestock in the landscape dispenses with barbed-wire fences and thorn hedgerows, so that grape-laden vines and orchards bowed down with apples are quite open to the road (Ireland's many Provence regulars must excuse my wonder: I live in a maze of boundary walls, ditches and barbedwire).
Prepared to think the worst of indiscriminate French passion for la chasse , the visiting naturalist looks at once for all the birds missing from the countryside. Allouettes sans tΩtes et ses pattes, offered the blackboard outside the local restaurant, La Terrasse des Cigales, and sure enough, no skylarks were left to be seen in the fields, with or without their little heads.
There were magpies and crows in modest numbers, little flocks of collared doves, a sprinkling of sparrows and tiny warblers, the occasional raptor watching for mice, but of the middle-sized range of thrushes and finches, not a flutter.
How odd to see fields of withered sunflowers, their great seed-heads ripe and drooping, and not a bird in attendance! But songbirds can have tremendous appetites. Bullfinches ravage the buds of pear and cherry orchards, blackbirds and thrushes peck holes in apples and plums, finches of all sorts flock to sunflower seeds. It is all very well, on a pastoral island, to decry the slaughter of the passerines, forgetting the havoc they can wreak in more fruitful latitudes.
One does not, in any case, go to the Provence interior for birds (the Camargue, on the other hand, at the Rhone delta to the south, is a fascinating, if mosquito-rich, treasury of species). But the imbalance of a countryside missing its share of thrushes and blackbirds emerges in odd ways.
The aridity and heat of Provence in the summer send earthworms deep into the soil. For the little snails, however, escape from the heat lies in climbing up the stems of parched grasses and herbs and angling their shells vertically to minimise exposure to the sun. The shells are white - again, to reflect the sun - so that thousands, even millions, of centime-sized snails crust the wayside vegetation like unseasonable snow.
One night, a thunderstorm deluged the olive groves of Merindol (across the mountain from MΘnerbes, the village of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence) with a satisfying downpour. Next morning, on a hunch, I went to inspect the snails and found them all down from their perches, feeding on moist leaf-litter or mating while conditions were propitious. Later, as the warm mist burned away, they climbed aloft again, still without attention from any predatory bird.
In the gift shop at Merindol, the dumpy cigale, or cicada (not actually the grasshopper we might suppose but a noisy homopteran bug), was celebrated in many forms, most disquietingly in big pottery effigies to hang on the wall, like ducks. I meant several times to go hunting them among the pines, but then someone would fill my glass again . . .
Gathering fresh figs for breakfast, I noted an almost total absence of insects to deal with the fruit that had plopped to the ground. In Ireland, anything so sweet and succulent would be scissored by ants and beetles and buzzing with wasps and flies. No ruby-eyed moths came butting at the villa's flyscreens, and a full moon waxed and shrank without one flicker of a bat. All those gleaming melons and flawless supermarket apples, all those weedless vineyards with the red soil of CΘzanne, must be well-sprayed with pesticides and herbicides.
Among this intensive husbandry, the wild herbs of Provence hold their ground. A villager mowing his olive grove scents the sunrise with thyme; on the hillside, rosemary casts a spiky shadow over rock; at the roadsides, fennel rises in feathery bushes and a golden haze of flowers.
Respectons la nature! exhorts a sign at a riverbank birdwatchers' hide. Its species panel offers half-a-dozen ducks which may be shot from now on (though not, one must hope, from the hide), plus the moorhen, the coot and the great-crested grebe. Only little egret and grey heron get protection; also, we are reminded, the European beaver, Castor fiber, which burrows in the banks of the Rhone and has been safe since since 1909.
Another unexpected survivor is reportedly causing mayhem down at the glittering C⌠te d'Azur. All the hunters of Provence, it seems, cannot kill enough wild boar in the high oakwoods (18,000 last year) to stem their summer travels to irrigated golf courses and hotel lawns in a badger-like excavation for earthworms. And in the orchards, they butt peach trees, shaking the ripest fruit to the ground - inviting, perhaps, dispatch to the menu as ready-made porc aux peches.
