This site open in August 2024. I created it with 3 main goals in mind. The 1st is to help to identify living species. The 2nd is to allow access to my publications on my Facebook page, most of them being wildlife photography. The 3rd is to share some articles about the living world that are a little "offbeat", that is far from the mainstream ideologies of our contemporary societies.
Did you guess, my name is Franck! When I was a very young child, barely able to walk and speak, I was amazed in front of nature and living beings. This feeling never left me, but I begin my life as a retiree: so I have time to fully dedicate myself to things that interest me. My actions will more and more have this common point: I would like to contribute to make people love nature and living beings, people who are more and more cut off from these vital realities, whose actions compromise now all ecological balances on the planet.
One of my favorite activity is photography, and even if, from school to college, I was a math-science guy, I am not entomologist neither even biologist. So it is through photography mainly that I make discover living species and I hope inspire interest, surprise, admiration, wonder, and who knows maybe at the end, love and respect for the living. From time to time, there is scientific erudition, but don't be fooled: this is just a varnish that everybody can acquire with some curiosity.
A big part of the site is devoted to catalog all the species I meet, hence the name for this site, that has no religious (oy irreligious) inspiration. My inventory its rather European, rather French, rather "francilian" (from Isle-de-France, the region around Paris), and more specifically centered on where I live: Chaville, in Hauts-de-Seine, beside Yvelines, just beside the forest of Meudon and not too far from the vallée de la Bièvre (Beaver's valley).
I built this site to allow me to add the more easily as possible new observations and photos of the species I met and related information. I hope to provide a practical tool for observers and photographers. Pages dedicated to living taxons will grow little by little with information about life and behaviour of every taxon, information found on well documented sites but also based on my own observations, that will be useful to observers/photographers.
Species presented here are in priority those we know/meet/oserve the less. Mammals contains a limited number of species, most of them well known and easy to recognize. So my priority goes on the side of smaller species like birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mostly the really smaller ones : insects, arachnids and other bugs unknown by a majority of us. Many of them were unknown by me not so long ago. For plants and mushrooms, il will depend on random encounters, of esthetical, scientific, ecological (or gastronomic) of the species, or even on news or common ideas ("weeds", "invasive plants"...)
On all sites, even the most serious of them, an identification error is possible. Errare humanum est, and sometimes humanum is tired, in a hurry, not fully focused. Or simply, it's common, we tie the specimen we see to the species we know well, sometimes omitting a small difference. That is why there are determination keys for most of the species, with a precise set of criteria leading to the identification. But sometimes, we believe that we don't need these keys ("I know well", "These species is not present in the region"...), or keys are inapplicable: they require information, often microscopic, we don't have. The best specialists have to be satisfied with genus only without being able to determine the species, sometimes they stop at the family level or even higher.
We live on an amazing planet that is really one of its kind. It is our only boat, there is no (and there will not be any) lifeboat. Thus me must, now that we get close to 10 billiards of human beings (or roughly human, sometimes only biologically human), learn to live otherwise, or our boat will not tolerate us a long time. We can no more live as apes, conquerors, selfish, even aggressive and bellicose as we did during 2 millions years (that's the age scientists give to the human genus), as we did even more during the last 2 thousands years. We have to learn how our boat is wonderful, precious, but also limited and fragile, et realize how much our actions have impact.
You guess from these few lines which is the main orientation of the articles published here. The goal is to raise awareness, make discover, provoque reactions, starting by: thinking! The goal is to help to understand the logic of nature, of living, of ecosystems, help to see consequences of our actions on environment.
I have been posting almost regularly for a few years now, publications mostly photography-oriented, including a lot of wildlife/animal photos. But I still often meet people who do not have any Facebook account, and therefore can not go to my page and find my publications. Some of these are people of a certain age who passed nearby social networks without ever having the desire to get into them: good for them for living without social networks and with a minimum of Internet. What's more, I must confess that I'm not a fan of the Facebook publication search system. So the idea is to provide here a small search engine to find what might interest us among my Facebook publications.
Search results are displayed on this site, with a link to the Facebook page. And because my articles are "public", even those who don't have a Facebook account can access them, even if the can not surf further among all other publications neither use Facebook features (comment, ask a question, chat...). I have the feeling that, without FB account and on smartphone, photos can not be displayed in full size, only in a preview with reduced size. I did not try on a computer without FB account.
The idea is to make visiting the site as convenient and user-friendly as possible.
This starts with your choice of language, English or French. By default, the site relies on the language preferences set in your browser, but you can change the language in the options page (provided you accept the cookie used to save your preference).
You can then choose and configure the home page, between the latest species listed, the latest articles published, the latest Facebook posts (provided you accept the cookie used to save your preference).
The site saves these 2 preferences, language and home page, in a cookie, if of course you accept the use of cookies. This site uses no other cookies. In particular, it does not include elements from foreign sites, especially those whose purpose is to track your every move on the Internet in order to better target you commercially or control you socially.
You can use the contact page to dial with me. I will read your messages, sooner or later, not always in the second you sent it. They are all welcome if they are send with good intentions: initiate an interesting discussion, report an error in a page or a bug on the site, suggest improvements or express a wish. To avoid annoyance (chatty trolls, spammers, hackers), messages are limited to max 1000 characters, and the interval between 2 mailings must be at least 15 minutes.
Please, be precise enough in the title, so I can have a clear idea of the content, and be concrete enough in your message so I am sure to understand well what you are talking about. Imagine you're talking to a mentally retarded person - it's not always that far from reality. 