the essential
Moissagais Jacques Laporte has been photographing local fauna and flora for years. We accompanied him for half a day on his “seed garden” at the Tarn et de la Garonne leisure center.
Jacques Laporte is an image hunter. This dashing septuagenarian, who sublimated the pastry arts throughout his professional life on the rue du Marché in Moissac, dove headlong into his youthful passion upon retirement.
This naturalist in love with the living has learned to become one with the formidable biodiversity that surrounds us, to tell us about it through his objectives, and to make us aware of both its fragility and its resilience: the living suffers, but do not break up, even if the situation is alarming.
For his animal and particularly ornithological observations (but he is also interested in plants and is also knowledgeable about orchids), he set up around fifteen hides from Quercy to Gascony via the confluence zone between Tarn- et-Garonne, a real little Mesopotamia.
Small basic cabin and “seed garden”
He invited us to spend a morning with him at one of his favorite places, near the Tarn et de la Garonne leisure center in Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave.
DDM – C.L.
A small basic cabin made from recycled pallets with smoked glass for discretion adjoins the “seed garden”, a tiny Japanese garden that Jacques created to accommodate the small local fauna. “From November to March during the winter, I regularly leave some nuts, sunflowers, acorns, hazelnuts and fat for the birds,” says Jacques while carrying out this task. He is at home here, on this dike which overlooks the body of water, in fact he organizes naturalist outings for the leisure center every year in the summer. Once the food has been distributed, we enter the shed and wait in silence. Very quickly, the farandole begins. The jays come to raid in squadrons, followed more timidly by the tits (great tits and blue tits), as well as the sparrows.
About fifteen species
The robin shows its nose, as well as the chaffinch or even the rarer stone-crushing grosbeak, recent in our latitudes. The elegant and fierce nuthatch is also out. Mammals are not left out, with visits from the field mouse (or would it be a vole?) and the magnificent red squirrel. “A good fifteen species come regularly to the seed garden” concludes Jacques at the end of this half-day immersion in the heart of the fauna of our regions. We emerged from the small shed dazzled by the daylight, but above all by this still very significant biodiversity, which must be preserved at all costs. With the alarming decline in the number of insects, at a crucial stage of the food chain, birds are becoming rare. However, and Jacques is convinced, the situation is not desperate. The confluence zone of Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave reveals itself as an ecological sanctuary, and Jacques (as well as many other seasoned observers) intends to remain one of its most faithful protectors and ambassadors.
