10,000 Birds
MAY 10, 2015
As we move from Spain towards the east however, it starts getting interesting as soon as we reach Italy. Italy has an almost endemic … well … “form” of Sparrow, the Italian Sparrow , whose taxonomic affinities and rank have been a matter of dispute ever since scientists started to think about it.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 26, 2013
Confiscated from a poacher in Brescia, Italy, this robin will be released to fly away into an uncertain world, where habitat is threatened and predators and poachers await. Thanks to a little human intervention, the future looks much brighter for Millerbirds. The survival of songbirds depends in part upon eliminating illegal hunting.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 7, 2016
The coast of the Mediterranean Sea is used mostly as a wintering ground, with just a handful of breeding colonies between Greece, northern Italy and eastern Spain (and recently through central Europe all the way to Ireland). So there you have it: conservative taxonomy leads to unfortunate common names.
10,000 Birds
JANUARY 14, 2022
In fact, the family name Lanius derives from a Latin word for “butcher”, though the “butcherbird” was a butcher long before humans even developed the language to describe these activities. Who knows – perhaps early humans got the idea of cutting and hanging meat by watching these shrikes at work in their arboreal abbatoirs?
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 20, 2012
Dates of first arrival listed by Schorger (1966) are: Italy 1520, Germany 1530, France 1538, England 1541, Denmark and Norway 1550, Sweden 1556. Early research suggested that “Fragmented distributions and population bottlenecks due to human activities appear to have increased genetic differentiation among populations” (Leberg 1991).
10,000 Birds
MARCH 29, 2019
After three visits to southern Italy, followed by a lone excursion to Belgium, we’ll head back south to end our month-long “Grand Tour” of falconry-themed wine and ales in Portugal.
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 23, 2024
Storks, Ibises and Spoonbills goes on to give greater detail of the former nesting sites in Europe: it could once be found “in southern Germany and Austria, in the valleys of the upper Rhine and Danube Rivers, and in the Alps of Switzerland, Italy and Germany, and perhaps in Hungary and Greece”.
258 
Let's personalize your content