A couple hiking in northeastern France came across an unusual historical artifact – a carrier pigeon message dating from 110 years earlier. Jade Halaoui said he was hiking with his partner in the Ingersheim area when they spotted a tiny aluminum cylinder on the ground.

“I dug it up and I cut it to see what was inside,” Halaoui recalled.

Inside was a small piece of paper bearing a message the couple could not make out. They took it to the Linge Memorial museum, where curator Dominique Jardy enlisted the help of a German-speaking friend to translate the small script.

The message, dated July 16 and believed to have been from the year 1910, was authored by a Prussian infantry officer and details military drills in the Ingersheim area when Alsace was under German control.

Jardy said the aluminum capsule is believed to have been dropped by the carrier pigeon tasked with delivering it to its intended recipient. Jardy said the discovery was extremely unusual.

“It’s really very, very, very rare,” he told CNN. “It’s really exceptional.” He said the message will now be displayed at the museum.

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The magic of the forest revealed itself slowly. Strange-looking boulders adorned the landscape “in the most diverse and bizarre forms,” wrote one observer, “like herds of monsters grazing at the bottom of a valley.” When the sun burst through winter clouds, stripes of sunlight penetrated the oaks and beeches and Scots pines, turning grayish grass an iridescent green. Tree trunks were bathed in an orange glow, and fields of dried ferns lit up in pale yellow.

For the French, the name of this forest, Fontainebleau, evokes the elaborate 1,500-room chateau at its heart. From the 12th century on, the kings of France used the site, rich in deer and wild boar and close to Paris, as a hunting ground. In the 17th century, Louis XIV launched a grand initiative to expand the forest, which was followed much later by large-scale plantings of oaks, beeches and pines. Enlarged again in 1983, the forest now covers more than 50,000 acres, an area roughly three times the size of Manhattan.

But the story of the forest’s real magician is little known. Claude-François Denecourt was a career soldier in the French Army, but was dismissed from his post as concierge of a Fontainebleau barracks in 1832 because of his supposed liberal views. He took to wandering in the forest to combat his depression and there discovered the essential pleasures of traipsing through nature. From then on, he devoted himself to developing and promoting the Fontainebleau forest for the general public. Today he should be recognized and appreciated as both a clever entrepreneur and a pioneer—if not the inventor—of nature tourism.

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The law approved by parliament was more limited in scope than initial calls by French environmental activists to make green roofs that cover the entire surface mandatory on all new buildings. The Socialist government convinced activists to limit the scope of the law to commercial buildings.

The law was also made less onerous for businesses by requiring only part of the roof to be covered with plants, and giving them the choice of installing solar panels to generate electricity instead.

Green roofs are popular in Germany and Australia, and Canada’s city of Toronto adopted a by-law in 2009 mandating them in industrial and residential buildings.

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France’s environmental agency ADEME posted a tender document calling for proposals for wind farms comprised of between three to six turbines, with the capacity for at least five megawatts per turbine, at three sites in the Mediterranean and one site in the Bay of Biscay, off the southern coast of Brittany.

The call is part of a push by the French government to encourage the transition of France’s energy system from one that relies heavily on nuclear to one that produces at least a third of its energy through renewable technology. Monetary investments from the French government will come from the “Investments for the Future” program launched in 2010.

Projects will be selected not only on their technical merit and financial feasibility, but also the extent to which they would contribute to the growth of a floating offshore wind industry in France. The tender will be open for submissions through April 4, 2016.

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