FIDELMA COOK

THE first time I came to Las Molieres was in the month of April. The air was hot and sultry with a stillness my city soul presumed was the sound of La France Profonde. Returning alone over a couple of days to see it at different times, I realised that the silence was more than the solitude of its setting.

No, the vacuum of absence was never enlivened by the sound of birds, the usual backdrop to the countryside. At first I rationalised that, as many birds like to be close to habitation, the long emptiness of LM no longer drew them.

Plus, apart from a straggling rose valiantly climbing up the front of the house, there was no vegetation – no seeds to pluck, no grains to find.

When I moved in that July and finally sat out to survey my frightening kingdom, there were still no birds to chirp and comfort me that I had done the right thing.

The cicadas shrilled even through my newly discovered tinnitus; the frogs erupted in a nightly chorus from the ditches around me and bats flew as l’heure bleue turned into a star-spattered night and I scuttled inside. It took time, but as a garden emerged and plants were sought to encourage and shade both birds and insects, little by little, the birds came.

The first was a pair of collared doves who set up a rackety nest in the old mini-stable and their monotonous soothing calls became a backdrop of joy then minor irritation.

Other small birds followed and built nests in the wisteria that now garlanded the ugly facade. Do not ask me for names – even using the equivalent I Spy Book of Birds on t’internet leaves me baffled, as you know. And gradually I heard birdsong at last, including nightingales identified for me by a knowledgeable visitor.

But I have never had the equivalent of a dawn chorus, the joyous ode to life that I once expected to awaken me. Again, over the years, I decided that as my open fields are a fine hunting ground for raptors – hence why I put out no feeding boxes – wise birds give me a wide berth.

Instead I sat out listening to the sounds of farm work. All around me the fields are intensively cultivated for winter wheat, barley, rape, sunflowers and more recently strawberries and melons, coaxed on under ugly tunnels of plastic.

I’d lazily watch the spiralling plumes of drought dust, so I thought, spinning and rising in the wake of the machines. Occasionally I’d scent chemicals in the air and an acrid taste at the back of my throat and would take myself back inside and close all windows.

And then I began to look at what I was seeing and in my ignorance... ignoring. France is one of the most heavily pesticided countries in Europe and my region, the Tarn-et-Garonne, the fruit basket of the hexagon, has always been the worst of all.

Fields of apples, pears, kiwi fruit, plums and peaches are heavily doused in chemicals to ensure the survival of their planters.

My eyes, once wide and delighted at the richness of the vegetables in the much-loved markets, now took on a cynical gaze at their production. The ruby red of the luscious tomatoes no longer a gift from God but from multinationals.

And yet, like many of us here, I kept my mouth zipped as guests breathed deeply my country air before setting off on a walk, convinced of the immediate benefits of such. After all, it had to be better than the petrol fumes of the city, non?

I mocked the young English satellite fixer who rushed into the house and refused to go back out until they’d stopped spraying across the road.

“I don’t want cancer,” he said. I made him a coffee and mimicked him later to my French friends for a cheap laugh.

Anyway, my growing garden was filled with butterflies, humming-bird hawk moths, bees, every variation of insect that ever crawled or flew and lizards that sprawled and proliferated in every stone crack. But still the birds’ chorus was more quartet than full Gospel choir.

And last year I started to notice another strange thing. The farmers had taken to wearing facemasks even in their air-conditioned tractors.

But weren’t we cutting down on the harsher pesticides?

Last week a study gave the shocking news that, in the past 15 years, one third of birds have disappeared from the French countryside due to the injudicious use of pesticides. The pattern is repeated all over Europe and the UK.

The pesticides don’t harm the birds directly but kill the insects on which they feed. The French Government has pledged to halve the country’s pesticide use by 2020, yet, according to reports, sales are still soaring.

A bird’s extinction does not perhaps create the same emotion as that of an African white rhino or the doubtful future of the polar bear and elephants.

But when the birds no longer sing and build nests alongside us to include us in their natural world, then I truly believe we are damned. And the silence will be profound.