I thought it was a sketch from a guide !!!

And another white heron ! I find Little, Cattle and Great Egrets we have in France already too many to sort out…

Indeed, and the lesser-known Lukasz Zwalinski...

...so two very different lifer styles, both effortless: the ready-made, and the self-found.
For context: there’s just this one WWBT in France right now, a handful during this autumn.
And just a handful of Grey Phalaropes now; this is the only inland one, brought by Storm Benjamin.
#birds
3/3

Then I drive to another spot with a full view of the lake. Barely out of the car, I hardly notice a very common Black-headed Gull landing next to a very common Herring Gull just meters from shore.
Wait, this Black-headed is minuscule, yes indeed, this is a Grey Phalarope!
#birds
2/3

Then I pinged the same people through direct email: immediate answer, either accepting, or apologising and giving me a handful of alternate referees, very nice!

Looks like I'll stick to private emails for invites from now on.

(I do understand the editor's pov worrying about nothing happening)
3/3

...while I was searching for referees through private email (this paper was really tricky, and it was summer).
So this time, I only used the official platform to invite referees: dead silence!
(even with the hand-crafting of a few lead sentences in the standard email)
2/3

Let's call it for what it is : Regression to mediocrity

Thought the same

j'identifie pas le fromage, meule trop petite pour du comté ou du gruyère?

It sounds a bit like the true Bossuet quote
"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes."
"God laughs at men who complain of the consequences while cherishing the causes."

Laplace did work a lot on integration; he was famously the first to integrate the Gauss function to sqrt(pi), and Laplace's integral transform is prominent in the math toolbox.
But the quote cannot be traced earlier than I. Gordon and S. Sorkin, The Armchair Science Reader, New York, 1959. ...

Interesting! « Tourner » is very common, (for « to turn ») but « ato(u)rner » did not make it to modern French.