We didn’t see a single carrion crow during our time in Rome, the hoodies seemed so at home in the city. I like the Italian name for the hooded crow: corvo incappuciato.
The herring gull gets the name gabbiano reale, which literally translates as the ‘real gull’. Perhaps that’s like us describing one of our species as the ‘common gull’. We also saw a few black-headed gulls – gabbiano con testa nera – congregating alongside the cormorants, comorano, on a mud-bank on the Tiber as we crossed the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Looking it up in my field guide, it seems that a female sparrow that we saw in the park near the Villa Medici would be the Italian sparrow, passero, although to us it looked identical to a female house sparrow. It was outnumbered by tree sparrows: ten of them were pecking amongst the gravel.
Also in the park we spotted a greyish bird, which looked smaller than a robin. It perched on the bark of a tree, then flitted off to perch on branches and on statues. We didn’t get a good enough look at it to identify it.