The Arburacellu (the Bird Tree)

Two people out picking wild asparagus found this tree in 2017. A year later, France voted it the country's tree of the year. What they walked into is a cork oak of roughly 200 to 250 years, fifteen metres tall and four metres round, shaped like a bird. Lightning is the likely explanation. A strike disrupts the flow of sap, the cork bark grows back wrong, and here it grew into three outgrowths that from the right angle read as a raptor with its head raised and its wings spread. Fire reached it at some point too. The core is burnt and hollow. The man who found it, out foraging with his granddaughter, took it to the person who had already had Ghisonaccia's other old tree, a mastic reckoned at a thousand years, officially recognised. The oak was entered in the 2018 Arbre de l'Année, run by Terre Sauvage and the national forestry office, and took the public prize with 3,053 votes of more than 12,000 cast. The following year it came fourth in European Tree of the Year, with 29,140 votes of 311,772. So it is famous for its shape rather than its age, and famous only since a vote, which is rarer still. It stands beside a rural lane on the eastern Corsican plain near Gattone, and people now drive out specifically to find the angle where the bird appears.