Une chauve-souris dans la cheminée

I was going to say: Same bat time... same bat place. But it wasn't either of those. It was another bat. A baby. In French, a bat is called « une chauve-souris » — "a bald mouse." I didn't know why until I looked it up a second ago.

Here's the story: We have an electric fan in the living room for the summer. It sits on the floor right in front of the fireplace, which has a wood stove in it. Early yesterday evening, when the air outside was starting to cool down, I went over to switch the fan on.

Something moving, slowly, in the wood stove

As I did, my eye caught sight of a slight movement inside the wood stove, which has a glass window in the door that lets you enjoy watching the fire on cold winter evenings. My first thought was "rodent" — but the movement was too slow and deliberate for it to be a mouse. Could it be a toad? No, probably not, though we have lots of toads around the yard.

And then I realized it was a bat, and a very small one at that. It must have fallen down the chimney, I guessed. I tried to take some pictures but there were too many reflections on the stove's glass door at that hour to get anything clear. Walt came over to look.

We decided to open the stove door and see if the baby bat would fly away. "We'll have to try to shoo him out of the house," Walt said. All the windows were wide open. But when we opened the door, the bat just sat there. He seemed weak or somehow stunned. Maybe he was dying.

The baby bat on a gardening glove

Walt ran downstairs and found a pair of thick leather gardening gloves. He carefully picked the baby bat up and took him out to the table on the terrace. The bat still just sat there. Walt carefully pulled his hand out of the gardening glove and the bat stayed on it, on the table, not really moving.

Then Walt went and got a tablespoon filled with fresh cold water. I was thinking, well, if I had been lying in ashes in the bottom of a wood stove on a hot day in July, I'd probably be pretty thirsty. When we offered the spoonful of water, the baby bat drank some, tentatively. Then he drank a little more.

At that point, I went and got a teaspoonful of milk. When I offered that to the baby bat, he drank eagerly. Daintily, but eagerly. He obviously liked it. The amount he consumed was not more than a few drops, but then he was a tiny creature.

He drank some water out of a soup spoon, and then some milk.

Suddenly, he started moving. He crawled a few inches to the edge of the table and hung there by one foot, head down. I thought maybe he needed a little more milk, so I held the spoon close to his face for a few seconds. He didn't seem to want any more.

Then he crawled back up onto the table. I tried to give him more water, but no dice. So I came back inside to look at some pictures I had taken. A few minutes later, when I went back outside to see what he was doing, there was no sign of him. He was gone. I hope and assume that he flew away, small as he was.

Walt said he thought the bat he accidentally killed the other night just might have been this little one's mother. I wonder if she and the baby might have been living in the top of our fireplace chimney. If so, the mama bat obviously flew into our attic window by mistake and couldn't find her way back out. She perished.

The baby bat stayed in this position on the edge of our
outdoor table for a few minutes. Then he was gone.

At least we saved, possibly, the baby. He really lapped up that milk. We didn't see him fly away, but I searched all around and couldn't find him anywhere under the table or chairs, or in the geraniums we have in planter boxes.

I read on Wikipedia that female bats usually have just one baby at a time, several times a year.

I read on another web site that the French term for bat, chauve-souris, comes from a Greek term, cawa sorix, that meant "owl mouse"— owl for the bat's nocturnal habits and its wide wingspan, and mouse for the shape of its body and head. The word cawa gradually got confused with the Latin/French word calva, from which are derived calvitie (baldness) and chauve (bald). That's how the bat became a "bald mouse."

Growing mushrooms in Bourré

La Cave Champignonnière des Roches in the village of Bourré, near Montrichard and Saint-Aignan, is a survivor. Mushrooms used to be big business in this part of the Loire Valley. After the Bourré limestone had been exhausted and quarrying operations closed down in 1914, the local people turned to mushroom growing in the underground tunnels to salvage the local economy. Here's a link to the bilingual Cave des Roches web site.

Mushroom "caves" in the Cher River Valley, near Montrichard,
Amboise, Chenonceaux, and Saint-Aignan

Mushroom-growing became a huge operation. More than 50 people were employed at the Cave des Roches alone in its heyday, and there were several other mushroom cellars as well. A big mushroom-canning plant was built nearby. The mushrooms grown and processed in Bourré were the ones called « champignons de Paris » in French — "button mushrooms" is what we call them. They were first grown commercially in the underground network of tunnels left by quarrying in the Paris area — hence the name.

The Cave des Roches mushroom farm is underground,
a few hundred feet below this vineyard in Bourré.

In the mid-20th century, the Cave des Roches produced more mushrooms in a day than it now produces in a month, the tour guide told us. There are currently only six employees. The mushroom business in the Loire Valley is now a specialized activity catering to a small, upscale market, and of course a tourist attraction. The relatively small Bourré mushroom harvest goes not to large-scale canning operations and retail sales, but to high-end restaurants and gourmet chefs.

A Fiat tractor at the Cave des Roches

What happened to cause such a decline in Loire Valley mushroom production? New cultivation methods across Europe — hydroponic methods in vast greenhouses — changed everything. Quality declined too, overall, the Cave des Roches people say. Mushrooms grown hydroponically under artificial conditions in gigantic greenhouses are clean, white, and pretty, but bland and textureless, compared to mushrooms grown according to traditional methods in the natural environment of old-style cellars.

Shiitake mushrooms grow on
these blocks of vegetable compost.

The Cave des Roches has survived by diversifying and going upscale. Instead of growing tons of button mushrooms, nowadays they grow shiitakes, gray and yellow oyster mushrooms, and a variety called the blue-foot — le pied-bleu. Restaurant chefs want the unusual and the exotic. Those mushrooms cost two, three, or four times to grow as do standard champignons de Paris, and the sales prices reflect that.

Shiitakes

Les cueilleuses — the gatherers or pickers — work their way through the mushroom galleries several times a day, harvesting the mushrooms that are ready for market. The button mushrooms grown here are brown, not white, ones, and have a lot more flavor and texture than the pure white ones you get at the supermarket. The temperature in the old quarry tunnels is a constant 13ºC, or about 55ºF, year-round.

Brown button mushrooms (champignons de Paris)
grow in pasteurized horse manure in the Bourré cellars.

Button mushrooms are grown in beds of pasteurized, composted horse manure. Blue-foot mushrooms grow in beds of vegetable-matter compost, and La Cave des Roches produces 40% of the world blue-foot crop. Shiitakes are grown in still another specialized compost mixture. Each growing medium is pasteurized or sterilized, so that other mushrooms and bacteria don't contaminate the crop, and then injected with pure mushrooms spores produced in laboratories under controlled conditions.

A cluster of yellow oyster mushrooms (pleurottes jaunes)
emerges from hole poked in a plastic bag full of compost.

Oyster mushroom are grown in spore-injected compost contained in black plastic leaf bags. Holes are punched in the bag and a cluster of mushrooms grows out of each hole. When the clusters are ready to pick, the gatherers poke another hole in the bag, at a different spot, and a new cluster emerges. If left to their own devices, all the oyster mushrooms would grow and "ripen" at the same time, and they couldn't be harvested over a period of weeks. The hole-in-the-bag method produces a series of crops at a regular rhythm.

Blue-foot mushrooms (pieds-bleus) are
a specialty of the Cave des Roches

At the Cave des Roches, there's a boutique where you can by both fresh and processed mushrooms of all the varieties grown in the cellars. The processed ones are sold in tins and in jars. As Walt said in his post yesterday, the tour guides speak both French and English. The tour takes about an hour. Bring a fleece jacket or a sweatshirt with you when you come, even if it is hot outdoors.

Swallows’ nests at Chenonceau

One of the sights I saw last week with our visitors from California was the château at Chenonceaux, which is called « le château de Chenonceau » in French. I don't know why the name of the village is a plural form, with a final -x, but the name of the castle is in the singular. I think it's just one of those things designed to trip up foreigners.

I hadn't been to Chenonceau in 5 or 6 years. It's one of those places about which you might say: “Nobody goes there any more — it's too crowded.” It was crowded last Wednesday, but it wasn't mobbed. I enjoyed the visit. We went through all the rooms in the château that are open to the public.

Swallows' mud nests on the old tower at Chenonceau château

I have a lot more pictures but today I'm posting only two. I noticed there were a lot of swallows' nests under the ledges on the upper sections of the old tower of the château. The gift shop used to be located in this tower, but now it's closed and a new bigger, more modern shop is located at the entrance to the property, in the building where tickets for admission are sold. You can't stop progress. The old shop had more charm.

Unusual birds' nests, made of mud

Swallows were swooping all around the tower, catching, I assume, insects to feed to chicks in the mud nests you see here. There are many nests like these on the walls of buildings in Saint-Aignan and other towns and villages too.

A nice cool weekend

The weekend rainstorm — we got about 1½ inches in a couple of hours Saturday morning — along with two days of cooler weather, really freshened up the vegetation and the entire look of the countryside. The weather is normal now — cool mornings, comfortably warm afternoons and evenings. More heat is predicted, though.

The generous rain really plumped up
the grapes growing out in the vineyard.

I went on walks with the dog on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. For the first time in a week, poor Callie was happy to have a long promenade. For days, it had been far too hot for her to be comfortable out in the sun. She'd be happy to go out, but lose her nerve after walking just a short distance. Inside the house was where she wanted to be.

This is a blackberry blossom. I hope we get tons of berries.

Bertie modified his schedule for the duration of the heat wave. Instead of coming in at dusk, he would stay outside until after dark — until after we had turned in, actually. At first it bothered me to go to bed and leave the cat out wandering the neighborhood, but I got used to it.

Cornflowers are blooming all around the edges of the vineyard.
This one is just opening up to the early morning sunshine.

Mornings, when I got up, he was usually there, happy to get his daily ration. On one or two mornings I didn't find him in the garage, but I put his food down anyway. Thirty minutes later I would go down and find his bowl empty and, as often as not, he would be sleeping on his bed. During the hot spell, he would sleep away the day in the garage, where it's fairly cool. Late in the afternoon, out he'd go again.

An impossibly blue cornflower

So I concluded that the cat was spending time outside during the cool nighttime hours, and then spending the hot daylight hours indoors. The sun must be hot on the back of a jet black cat.

Tomato flowers were left undamaged by
Saturday's early morning downpour.

After the hard rain Saturday morning, the garden was fairly beaten down. Walt picked up the tomato plants and washed the mud off their leaves, using the gentle spray from a watering can. He was afraid the summer squash plants had suffered a fatal blow, but by afternoon they had perked back up, their wide leaves standing tall again.

I spotted this nice butterfly on my walk Saturday afternoon.
I took the picture by zooming in from quite a distance,
and I'm still surprised it came out so nice.

Sunday we went to spend the afternoon with an English friend at her house in a village six or seven miles south of ours. It was the day of the Wimbledon final — Nadal vs. Berdych — and our friend has English TV via satellite. The match wasn't being shown live on French TV, and even the delayed broadcast was on a pay channel (Canal+) that we don't get.

Walt and Callie arriving at our friend's house
in a village south of Saint-Aignan

Nadal won. I was kind of hoping Berdych might pull off a surprise victory. We spent a nice afternoon watching tennis, sipping a glass of wine, and eating a box of See's chocolates that our recent visitors brought us from California.

Callie was happy to arrive.
She still hates riding in the car.

Did I tell you we now have an ice cream maker? The Englishwoman who left Bertie the Black Cat with us — she went back to work in the U.K. — also left the ice cream machine behind. So far, over the past week, we've made and enjoyed eating batches of lemon ice cream, coconut sorbet, and vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce. Today we're going to make cherry frozen yogurt.

Better stretch out those walks with the dog...