Corsican nature

It's our experience that Italy has few birds but plenty of lizards, while Spain has many birds buttes lizards. These facts are presumably connected.
Corsica has few birds but lizards are numerous.... this one is a Tyrrhenian wall lizard.

Late September is before the autumn rains so most flowering plants were burned off by the summer sun, apart from the ever-present stink-asters on roadsides and old fields.
Watered gardens become havens, therefore, for both plants and their insects.

This autumn squill under coastal pines was an exception.

We had seen two-tailed pashas on previous trips to the Med but only from a distance as they flitted across the Maquis looking for rotting fruit on palms and strawberry trees.
My luck was better this time as a pasha had taken a liking to rotting grapes on a cottage wall and stayed gorging itself while photos were taken.

This was followed by an even more unexpected encounter, when another landed at my feet of a beach, and proceeded to feed off the eelgrass on the sand.

Matching the pashas for size were some great banded graylings on water mint by a dry reservoir.

Birdlife was mostly jays, squirrelling away holm oak acorns like there's no tomorrow.

But one event of interest was a roost flight of little egrets out of the salt pans of Porto Vecchio onto these rocks in the harbour. And having collected strength in numbers, then into some reedbeds.

Meanwhile, back at the holiday village, the ponds were crowded with edible frogs -leaping splashily into the water at my approach.

The autumn rains had not yet fallen, so the island was parched and only stinking fleabane in profusion, and a few other hardy plants managed to flower in the dry soil.