Urban Birding

Lyon, like a lot of older European cities has a lot of pavement and not a lot of wildlife outside of parks. We actually haven't seen any spiders (Monica hates spiders) or ants or a lot of the typical natural pests we got back in California. So, what kind of birding can you do in Lyon? Well, there are plenty of pigeons... But one particularly unique bird we noticed was indigenous to Lyon. This is the googly-eyed graffiti bird.

Graffiti in Europe is something we just don't get. Rather than fight the problem, Europeans in general seem to have given up. There's simply too much flat concrete around. Sometimes, the best way to fight 'em is to join them. See if you can read the word scrawled on this graffiti - and notice the fries?



Well we had noticed a particular bird painted on train electrical boxes around the Lyon area. This became the way we knew we were almost home from a long train trip. We'd see the birds long before we saw signs for Lyon.



So, rather than get annoyed at graffiti, we adopted the googly-eyed graffiti bird as our home turf symbol. We even wanted to get a good picture of one for our scrapbook, but it is hard because normally when you see one, you are zooming by on a train.





To really get some good pictures would require a day of birding - urban style. Our friend Mark was game, so he and I went out on a sunny day to see if we could capture any shots of the elusive bird. The trouble was, the best way to see the bird was from a train. Finding a place to spot the bird on foot was not so easy. We eventually found a way on to the tracks and walked along a service path. We weren't sure if this was strictly legal... but we hadn't seen any signs saying it wasn't allowed. We trudged for quite some time with no luck when suddenly we hit paydirt!



We were suddenly up close with the Googly-eyed bird! I noticed the attention to detail! The vandal had even carefully painted the lock on the box in two colors so as to preserve the look of the bird. If you zoom in you can see the lock in the center.

At this point we knew that if we found no more birds, we still could call the day a success. But, we found more! Even a brown cubist-version!





The birds range quite far from Lyon and we've even seen them on the highway heading to and from the airport (but not other highways). So we think they are there for the travelers. Strange to think how we've gotten used to them saying hello and goodbye when we travel. See you later birds! We'll miss you too.