“It’s a cuckoo! Stop the car, stop the car — back up to just before that big dead tree on the side of the road.”
There, at 6:15 on a bright June morning, winding our way along narrow roads among the hedgerows of central Italy, I saw a large bird, smaller than a crow but bigger than a robin (all the birding books have a sample size chart that runs from sparrow to robin to crow to heron or some other very large bird) mostly gray but with flashes of white, long-bodied and perched upright like a predator on a bare branch, giving it an unobstructed view of skittering rodents or smaller songbirds.
We are due to catch a train in the tiny dusty town of Terontola; we are close and have left ourselves plenty of time, so with a sigh, my husband Andy brakes and then backs up 100 feet or so while I scrabble in my too-tightly packed backpack for my binoculars. I wear my binoculars as much as I possibly can — while walking pretty much anywhere, from the sidewalks and parks of New York or Washington to the towpath on the Delaware-Raritan canal, when driving to the store, or when sitting and working with a view of a feeder or an olive tree.
