The forest bird

Michel Munier

800 nights under a Christmas tree
A life dedicated to a bird

As I turn the pages of my old notebooks, faithful companions of observation piled up in a cardboard box for fifty years, emotions and memories resurface. Notes, sketches, arrows and timetables follow one another. I plunge back into the moments I spent in the forest, in the dead of night or on frosty mornings, hidden under a fir tree, listening attentively as I wrote blindly in the depths of my comforter. If all the beasts of this world have enchanted my existence, one in particular has led me on a path of awakening to the intelligence of the forest: the capercaillie.

Michel Munier is a fervent defender of the old-growth forests of the Vosges. Since the 1970s, he has been surveying the massif in all weathers, and has had a decisive encounter with a rare bird, the capercaillie, whose habits are discreet and mysterious. Eight hundred nights of stalking to experience moments of grace and beauty...

Some sixty of the author's archival images and naturalist photographs accompany the text.

Éditions Kobalann, November 2022
15.2 x 2.6 x 22.1 cm
256 pages