Uccelli italiani

Eurasian Nuthatch (photo from Wikipedia Commons)

My other little ancillary post about Italy is on bird-watching. It was never a main activity during the trip, but I did take my binoculars, and I did keep my eyes open for birds while I was there. I did most of my bird watching from the gazebo of the rental house in Castelnuovo, during breakfast.

What I learned quickly is that Italian birds are very shy. Our house looked straight out into a stand of trees and bushes. Every morning I'd be waked at about 5 a.m. with a cataract of birdsong coming from these trees. There would still be plenty of singing going on when I got up an hour or two later (our hours varied, depending on whether there was a concert the night before), but I'd almost never see a single bird in these trees. Or if I did, it would dart into the underbrush before I could get a good look at it. American birds will usually let you look at them, at least for a few seconds.

Finally one morning I wised up and got up early. I went to an empty upstairs bedroom where I could peek out of the cracked shutters, and I had a little more success this way. It was very foggy most mornings, but I could at least see any birds that flew into the little fig tree right by the gazebo. This is how I saw a Eurasian Nuthatch, like the one in the photo above, and a couple of other birds.

About eight o'clock, while we were eating breakfast on the gazebo, the sun would burn through the fog and the swifts would start diving off the roof and into the valley, feeding on insects. They made a racket that is one of the characteristic sounds of European towns. Swifts, martins, and swallows circle every Tuscan town, especially in the morning and evening.

There was another sound I heard, all day long, everywhere I went. It was a very distinctive call, but I never could associate it with a particular bird. Every time I would identify a bird, I'd look to see if its call fit the description of what I was hearing, but it never did. I knew it must be a common bird, though, because I even heard it in Milan.

One I even asked Sr. Bertolani about it. He said, positively, that it was the canarini. I figured from what he was saying that he meant the European Serin, which is related to the canary and lives on the side of the hill where the house was. So that was the first Italian name for a bird that I learned. (Not that I've learned so many others!) But still, the song didn't fit the description for the Serin song in my bird book.

I never solved this mystery until we got back home. I finally e-mailed Cornell's ornithology department, through the Bird Guide site that's linked on my sidebar, and described the song. The person who answered my e-mail wasn't familiar with European birds, but she forwarded my question to someone else who was. And the verdict? The Common Chaffinch, probably the most common bird in all Europe! How could I have missed seeing the most common bird in Europe when I was there, with binoculars, and trying to keep my eyes open, for three weeks? It's beyond me, but there you go! I thought it was very nice of Cornell to go to the trouble to answer my question, though.

Here's my complete list. As usual, I haven't bothered to put it in strict taxonomic order:

Little Grebe

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Alpine Chough

Alpine Accentor

Common Blackbird

White Wagtail

Carrion Crow

Common House Martin

Barn Swallow

Common Swift

Great Tit

Blue Tit

Eurasian Nuthatch

European Serin

Blackcap

Italian Sparrow

and

Common Chaffinch!