Of the birds that are still MIA, Barn Owl isn’t so much of a surprise, I guess: our neighborhood is pretty densely vegetated by Sonoran desert standards, and the nearest open area for feeding is five or six miles away on the Santa Cruz, where the species does occur in banks and under bridges. Eventually one will fly over, snoring, late one night.

Another barn bird is a much less expected listing lacuna. Diurnal, abundant, and strongly migratory, a Barn Swallow or two should have passed over the yard at some point in these past nearly six years. We came close this morning, with three stub-tailed individuals half a mile away over Oracle Road–the vanguard of hirundinid migration, and right on time with Fourth of July coming up in just hours.

Alison reminded me that the most recent Barn Swallows we’d seen were on another continent entirely, a small flock (probably a family) perching on wires

and dramatically drinking from a Tuscan swimming pool.

It’s nice to think that those rondine are on their way south to Africa just as ours are moving to South America.

Pretty beautiful–and very common in the Apuan Alps a couple of weeks ago.

The photo gallery for next year’s Birds and Art in Tuscany tour is up now.

http://wingsbirds.com/galleries/gallery/167

Makes me wish I were back there already!

Les Baux, June 2009.

La Caume, June 2009.

La Caume, June 2009.

Remember the passage in Wild America where James Fisher admits to missing one thing about England? It’s the corvids: America, he mused, was lacking in great noisy social crows.

Fisher was talking about Rooks, of course, but whenever I’m in Europe admiring that continent’s diversity of crows and jays and magpies, I always think of that line. Tuscany earlier this month gave us lots of occasion to appreciate one crow I don’t see very often: Hooded Crow, the pied nominate race of the species that also includes the Carrion Crow.

Unlike their basic black cousins–decided country birds over most of their range–Hooded Crows in central Italy appear to be quite tolerant, pacing around in towns and on beaches, high in the mountains and in lowland villages. I can guarantee (rare word and carefully used in a birder’s vocabulary!) that this appealing species will be among the first to greet us in Rome next May–and may well be the last to wave goodbye when we fly out from Pisa.

The perched birds invariably attract a gang of House Finches, which sidle along the wires to crowd the big swallows, even chasing them when the martins find the finches too close for comfort.

I’ve seen this behavior repeatedly here in southeast Arizona, and am puzzled every time. What possible reason could House Finches have for mobbing Purple Martins? There is, no doubt, some slight potential for competition for nest sites–House Finches will happily tuck a nest into a saguaro cavity–but that seems a bit too abstract a motivation for this strange behavior.

Anybody know the answer to this mystery? I’m sure it’s obvious, just not to me.

My new Birds and Art in Tuscany tour will run for the first time next May 17-27, starting in Rome and ending in Pisa (the region’s major international airport). The approach is similar to that I take each year in Provence: birds provide the focus for the itinerary, but the experience is in getting to know a whole landscape, its history, its culture, and above all its art.

My co-leader Marco Valtriani and I spent a few days after my Provence tour scouting our route. It promises to be a good one, starting in the archaeological and natural riches of southern Etruria and ending up in the dramatically beautiful Apennines and Apuan Alps. Some images from some of the localities we’ll be exploring:

The tiny village of Branuccio, high in the Apennines.

The lobby of our hotel in Castelnuovo, tucked into the Garfagnana between the mountain ranges and along the Serchio, where Gray Wagtails flit beneath the city’s many bridges.

The garden, as seen from the pool, of our Castelnuovo hotel.

The Apuan Alps–wow.

The ceiling of the renowned church of Codiponte–and one of the proto-Romanesque capitals for which it is so famous:

Birders aren’t the only ones who enjoy the bright skies and warm days of Tuscany:

Living up to its name, Common Redstart is an abundant yard bird in Tuscan villages.

Even in the mountains, our birding will be relaxed and easy-paced, on wide, level paths and roads.

Mountain streams can be good birding; this one, at Equi Therme, produced Crag Martin and White-throated Dipper during our scouting. Three Peregrine Falcons appeared high above as we left, too.

Now rare over much of their former range, Red-backed Shrikes are reliably found in any open habitat. This is the male of a pair that was almost certainly nesting in the denser vegetation in the background.

It looks like snow, but it’s bright white marble at the edge of a quarry that’s been worked since antiquity.

There’s always time for a coffee break on a Birds and Art tour.

We’ll visit the fifteenth-century pilgrim hostel of San Pellegrino (not the source of the water!).

Here as everywhere else in Tuscany, we’ll be following in some pretty illustrious footsteps.

European Bee-eaters abound in coastal areas.

Orbetello Lagoon and the Argentario Promontory are major sites on our itinerary. They’ll both be crawling with migrants in May; on our June visit, notable species here included Common Shelduck, Eurasian Curlew, Stonechat, and Little Tern.

Not all culture is high culture, I suppose. (Anybody else remember the blue whale on the way to Higbee Beach?)

Our hotel near Manciano, where we’ll be spending the first six nights of the tour without the annoyance of packing and repacking, is a remodeled Tuscan estate.

And the views? Not bad.

This unassuming little pond just outside Albinia is famous for the rarities that have occurred there.

But on this visit we found the birding better at the old salt pans in Tarquinia. Those white dots are Slender-billed Gulls.

Italian Sparrows are pretty obliging, especially this male, tilting his head to show us his diagnostic crown pattern.

We’ll be eating very well indeed, both in restaurants and on a lavish picnic or two featuring local delicacies.

I hope you’ll join me next year. The tour already has several registrants, to my delight, and we’re going to have a great time.

Does it help if I note that this curious Passer was photographed on the grounds of Puccini’s villa on Lago del Torre?

There were lots of birds to see on my scouting trip to Tuscany, but Italian Sparrows really won the heart. Every bit as confiding and friendly as their domesticus cousins, these large-billed, chestnut-crowned birds are even more dapper as they bound along the sidewalks and dip into the bread baskets at outdoor cafes.

For the birder, the real question, of course, has to do with just what the Italian Sparrow “is.” With white cheeks, a colorful crown, and often a bit of streaking at the side of the breast and flank, males look like a cross between House Sparrow and Spanish Sparrow, and have often been considered a “stable hybrid population” between the two.

That’s always struck me as faintly risible, given that Italian Sparrows breed in places like Switzerland and Austria, far from the range of Spanish Sparrow in the narrow sense; and now it seems that most sources follow Töpfer in treating the bird as a subspecies of Spanish Sparrow (though if I remember rightly, Dutch Birding gives Italian Sparrow full species status).

None of that really matters to the birds. Or to me. I just enjoyed watching them everywhere we went, and am already looking forward to repeating the experience next year on my new Tuscany tour.

There’s no real way to sum up a tour as good as this spring’s Provence trip. The birding was great, the food was if anything even better, and the participants are all my friends now. Writing about the trip on the b-log and in my formal tour report, I felt nearly as sad at the end of my prose as I had at the end of our ten days!

Every tour, of course, leads to revision of the next, and the new itinerary for 2010 includes two significant alterations. I’ve removed Ventoux from the tour; though birding there can be good, I’ve now had two years of absolutely lousy weather up there, with snow in 2008 and rain in 2009. The only halfway reliable species we give up is Citril Finch, which showed reasonably well this year–and was found only on the scouting days in 2008.

And our day in Avignon, delightful as that town can be, is going to be replaced by visits to some of the Van Gogh sites around St-R émy, itself a wonderful medieval village with plenty to do and see. Unfortunately, none of the artist’s works is exhibited anywhere near our tour route, but we can see the hospital where he was admitted after that awkward incident with the ear, and many of the famous views he painted are still available, virtually unchanged a century and a quarter later.

So come to Provence with me next year, May 30 - June 7. You’ll enjoy it, and I know I will!

As usual, it took us more than an hour to get out of the parking lot. The clearings and the woods along the River Gard are unfailingly full of birds, and between Common Redstarts, White Wagtails, and the best looks we’d had yet at Cirl Buntings (one of my all-time favorites), we ran up a fine list of good birds and good looks even before we set off on the hundred-yard walk to the aqueduct itself.

Fully aware that our time together was approaching its end, we paid special attention even to the commonest birds, from Serins to this proud Wood Pigeon.

As we walked towards the Pont, Alison spied a Short-toed Woodcreeper, which gave brief but good views–and was immediately replaced in our attentions by a pair of Great Spotted Woodpeckers at a nest cavity. This was the first picid most of us had seen on the tour, and for some their first Old World woodpecker ever–a good way to break into that family!

As the sun rose and the air warmed, a few raptors lifted off: mostly Black Kites, of course, but a pair of European Honey-Buzzards soared in circles over the other bank of the river, slow and lazy enough to get them in the scope for lingering views. This is a species I haven’t seen often, and I enjoyed watching them every bit as much as did the rest of the group.

White and finally a couple of Gray Wagtails enlivened our wait for the star of the show, which arrived as a turquoise and orange streak down the river in front of us: Common Kingfisher. It perched on the rocks in the stream, flying from one to the other, giving everyone fantastic views of its implausibly bright blue back. We’d already managed excellent looks at Hoopoe, Roller, Cuckoo, and Bee-eater, and this sweet little kingfisher completed our list of the “big five” of European birding.

To our regret, we weren’t able to celebrate in traditional Pont du Gard fashion: the candy store is gone. So we turned back to the parking lot, hunger beginning to compete with birding. But just as it’s impossible to get to the pont with anything like promptness, the return to the vehicles is always delayed by one thing or another. This time it was by a flyby Golden Oriole, followed by exquisitely good scope views of Rock Sparrow–we’d had brief looks at a couple on the way in, but the bird that fed on the ground for ten minutes or more was superlative, even showing his throat spot a time or two. This is the bird of the Pont du Gard, and I was doubly happy to see it this year having missed it last.

Not even that was enough, it seemed. As I turned from the Rock Sparrow, a yellow rump vanished into the woodland edge. So we stood and waited, and finally two Green Woodpeckers materialized out of the grass, perching low on tree trunks for all the world to admire.

Fearing that we’d never get lunch, I had to just put it to an end. We piled back into the vehicles and drove to Beaucaire, a rough-and-ready town on the Rhone with a famous castle–and on that afternoon, a bull fight.

We couldn’t linger for the main event, but we watched the excitement as the bulls were drive down the main street by gardiens on white Camargue ponies with their classic trident prods. The youth of the town ran with the bulls as they raced helter-skelter beneath the plane trees: quite a scene, and one we would have missed if not for all the avian interruptions in the parking lot at the Pont du Gard.