Alcuni ucelli (a few birds)

I'll be honest: I didn't see a tremendous number of birds in northern Italy, even if we include the train ride from Milan as well as the Cinque Terre proper. (Come to think of it, all I remember from the train is stock doves and little egrets, both in abundance.) I photographed even fewer. The Cinque Terre is known more as a migration route than a birding destination in its own right; the combination of steep terrain and a large body of water in such close proximity make it roughly equivalent to Hawk Ridge near Duluth, Minnesota, but in reverse: Hawk Ridge concentrates southbound raptors in the autumn, while the Cinque Terre does the same for northbound migrants in the spring.

I might have done better if I'd made an effort to be up at or before dawn; the unrelenting heat limited bird activity, and therefore apparent bird diversity, for most of the day. Many of the birds I did manage to see were familiar already. Several, in fact, intentional or inadvertent imports, live in my neighbourhood: house sparrows (a.k.a. English sparrows), rock doves (common pigeons), and Eurasian collared doves.

And now, having hopefully lowered expectations to an appropriate level, here are a few bird photos I did manage to get:

Swallows (noticeable mainly by looking for their shadows) on the wall of a house in Corniglia. These are Hirundo rustica, the same Holarctic species we call barn swallow here in the States.

Collared dove, Streptopelia decaocto. The specific epithet, I've just learned, comes from an old Greek myth in which a servant complains about her pay of 18 coins (presumably drachmae) per year and is transformed by the gods into a dove whose mournful call can still be heard. The Greeks may have had another dove in mind, though; while the collared dove's original range may have stretched as far west as Turkey, it was probably not found elsewhere in the Mediterranean until the 20th century. Its sudden and rapid expansion in Europe has since been replicated here in North America; in all likelihood, there is a collared dove on my neighbour's TV aerial right now.

Rock dove, Columba livia. Along with collared doves, the most common and easily-observed bird in the Cinque Terre, where they come in both ancestral "blue bar" and derived, highly variable "city pigeon" plumages. I sometimes try to make a distinction between rock doves and pigeons, but here, where the same birds strutting through the piazzas or hustling for fallen bits of street food on the Via Roma may also be living on sheer cliffs over the turquoise Ligurian Sea, the distinction breaks down.

They're hard to see for such a boldly-patterned bird, but there are two hooded crows (Corvus corone cornix) on these rocks. Honestly, the hoodies are so obscure I shouldn't include this picture in a bird post, but I like the composition and overall feel, so you can play "where's Waldo" if you're so inclined.

Less obscure: yellow-legged gull, Larus cachinnans. Similar to, and sometimes classified as a subspecies of, the herring gull (L. argentatus). Our boat captain, Alessandro, called these "king gulls", which also seems apt.