Naturalist Andrea Corso is hauling his Leica scope through the blazing heat along the trails of Sicily’s Vendicari Nature Reserve. “Merlin gets so many birds wrong,” he says, as he catches me trying to Sound-ID the chittering of a Sardinian Warbler in the reeds. One of Italy’s preeminent experts in raptors and in dragonflies, he drove an hour from his home in Siracusa to meet us on the side of the road this morning at the entrance to this national park ringed by coastal ruins and Roman salt ponds. This is the last landfall on Sicily before Tunisia: The brackish lagoons are a fuel stop for birds crossing between Europe and Africa, making for a constantly rotating avian cast. Corso sets up in the blind and points the scope across the water at a neon-pink bouquet of Greater Flamingos ballet-dancing along the far edge of the lagoon, while grebes dive, avocets wade, and egrets and herons hunt in the foreground.
We’ve seen flamingos elsewhere in the Mediterranean, including in the Camargue, outside of Avignon. But in Sicily, an adventure to spot a flamingo also brings an outdoorsy edge to a few days of Baroque villages and beach time, while introducing us to an underexplored stretch of coastline—not to mention these holes in the rocky coast where, Corso tells us, archaeologists think the Romans used to torture prisoners of war with carnivorous eels.
Sicily is marvelous for birdlife, not just because trans-Mediterranean migrants regularly pass through. We’re staying just five miles from the reserve, where a hotelier couple reimagined the historic former estate of Prince Nicolaci in the UNESCO-protected region of Val di Noto and built Il San Corrado di Noto, with its neat white rows of suites and brand new villas tucked among citrus and olive groves with two scenic saltwater pools. Inland from here, the Iblean Plateau and the forests around Sortino are home to whole other sets of species, owls included. And at dusk in Noto over the clinking of glasses at sidewalk trattorias, crepuscular birds—two species of swift—swoop and spiral by the hundreds.
Central America
Three-wattled Bellbirds in Monteverde, Costa Rica
Photo: Getty Images
