We have cuckoos in Umbria; I hear their unmistakable eponymous call in the mornings and evenings and through the somnolent air of Italian Sunday afternoons, a quiet so deep that it has its own presence, seeping through the cracks of the stones and through the shafts of slanting light. I heard one earlier this morning, rising up from the valley near the lake, floating notes through my window as I folded my skirts and dresses in their battered cleaner bags. My birding books and apps tell me that cuckoos look and sometimes perch like sparrow hawks; their mimicry of predators makes it easier for them to colonize other birds’ nests to lay their eggs.
So here, surely, in the valley, alone and looking like a predator, at an hour when cars are barely on the road yet and the fields are still, is my bird. And yet… perhaps it was a shrike? The bird I glimpsed was stockier than the slim falcon-like shape of a cuckoo, streamlined for lethal plummeting dives (in the falcon, that is). I think that its chest, puffed out a bit like a bully, was white against the gray, but I did not see any bars, which the cuckoo has. The beak was crueler than a cuckoo’s. Most relevant, although cuckoos look like predators, they are not. They feed on invertebrates like caterpillars and worms. So they have no need of high perches on bare trees, the hallmark of the hawk.
Shrikes, on the other hand, are predators. Indeed, their very name makes that clear, a cruel combination of letters that is just one away from “strike.” The Great Gray Shrike is also a fairly common local denizen;
