Paris: Feeding The Terns

When I am in Paris my apartment is on rue Guénégaud (one time it was on Quai aux Fleurs) both of which are close to the river.

That is a good thing for a variety of reasons.

One of the reasons is that I can't eat an entire baguette in a day, and, with beautiful fresh ones available nearly round the clock, only an idiot would eat day old bread.

While confessing to a wide variety of idiocy, I don't eat day old bread when in Paris.

So there gets to be a lot of left over partial baguettes as the time passes.

So every couple of weeks I go to the river and feed the terns.

That's more interesting than one might think it to be.

Sometimes there are a few of the birds apparently waiting for someone to come along with a bag of bread cubes; sometimes there isn't one in sight.

The none in sight event is the interesting one: all one needs to do is stand at the quai's edge, whistle and throw some bread as high in the air as possible.

Almost immediately, as if from the void, clouds of terns appear, uttering their hoarse cries, and wheeling through the air like Mirage jets.

I once got a picture of a guy in the act of tern feeding.

A note of local color: I think the little smudge of reddish gold in the mid upper right of the image is Le Départ St Michel.