I finally made it! We went to the Camargue and I am absolutely ecstatic about it! What an amazingly beautiful place. Three times before in my life I went to Arles, Southern France, and each time something went wrong, so I never got to see this natural wonder. But today I found myself in the heart of it, and it was everything I dreamt of – and then more! So bear with me, this will be a marathon post of photos.

On our way to Camargue my kid spotted this! Never in my life did I see this many storks gathered in one place in the wild. We do have these birds in Denmark. But they are so rare that the newspapers write about, it if a pair of storks decides to build a nest in Denmark.
From there on it was just one little wonder after the other. As a biologist and photographer this was just heaven.
Eurasian coots resting on the shallow turquoise water. We were looking for flamingos, but these guys were beautiful too!
Great crested grebe and great cormorant were around too.
Eurasian coot, great crested grebe and great cormorant are all common in Denmark. Still they are a pretty sight. But we were looking for flamingos and suddenly there they were in all their pink glory.
It looks like I just snatched one pic and there I had it all perfect huh? Yea…no. I think I snatched a hundred if not more of the flamingos (and of the storks too by the way) To choose only one for the blog was next to impossible! But this next photo was exactly that: One super lucky shot where I had one chance and one second to point, focus, shoot. The next moment all what was left was a small ripple in the water and mud.
It is a ladder snake. Wikipedia later told us it is a common snake in the region. It is very aggressive and territorial and non venomous (we think). The three of us were totally ecstatic when we spotted it in a small muddy shallow stream.

From there on we stumbled on a lot of other critters: A coypu, which is an introduced pest from South American and really should be killed on sight. But this guy was incredibly friendly and walked right up to us, with a gorgeous, yellow, tooth, charming, smile. He lived to see another day. Down the path we found butterflies – red admiral and a speckled wood butterfly – a frog and a white heron. We saw prints in the mud from wild boar. We also got a few quick flashes of the bright blue kingfisher, sadly way too quick to catch for a photo, and of course there were herds of black bulls and white Camargue horses all over.
We went to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for lunch. The waves at the harbor there were impressive.
From there we went to Aigues Mortes to see the medieval city, and the impressive medieval city wall and to take a stroll on it. The pink water that surrounds this village nicely illustrates where the flamingo gets it’s color from.
And then, bathing in the evening sun it stood there, glaring at us, waiting for me to snatch its portrait. So of course I did 🙂