Third placement in the Italian Big Year of butterflies and burnets in 2020

In the unfortunate 2020 something that kept the moral high had been the race organized by the Facebook group Amici delle Farfalle (“Friends of the butterflies”): the first “Big Year” concerning butterflies and burnets. By the end of 2020, despite the lack of many trips abroad, I photographed 178 species classifying myself third in the race!

A day of photography in along the gulf of Trieste

Bird-photography in Italy is not easy like in other countries: decades of hunting pressure made the birds particularly shy and hardly approachable. The reserves along the gulf of Trieste offer one of the best options in autumn and winter.

The last day of 2019 birding in Friuli-Venezia Giulia

When somebody visiting Venice ask me about where to go birding, especially in autumn and winter, I usually suggest to go further than the Laguna di Venezia, leaving Veneto for the gulf of Trieste, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Yellow-billed Diver and other rare birds along the Gulf of Trieste

Recenly I went twice to the area of the Gulf of Trieste (Friuli-Venezia Giulia) to twitch some rare birds that, earlier than usual, came there at the end of autumn: Yellow-billed Diver (Gavia adamsii), Red-breasted Goose (Branta ruficollis) and Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser erythropus).

2 and half days of birding in the middle of the summer along the Upper Adriatic

The area of High Adriatic, around Venice, offers a lot of different options in order to explore different habitats and see large numbers of birds even in the heart of summer, when birdwatching is usually drammatically slow.

Bad weather, hard birding

In the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia winter can be truly arsh, with the local strong north-eastern wind, called “bora”, and heavy rain or snow. To be outside birding with that kind of conditions is a challenge, but often the bravers are rewarded with fantastic sightings!

Bullfinches and Lesser Redpoll in the Isonzo mouth

I’ve been once again in the area of low Isonzo river, one of the best ones in Italy for birdwatching, and I observed some finches that usually ar rather rare in the lowlands, but also some other interesting species of birds.

Autumn in the Dolomiti Friulane

The Parco Naturale delle Dolomiti Friulane is one of the wildest and less populated areas of North-eastern Italy: are mountains that in many cases can exceed the 2,000 m, far from big cities, covered by vast forests and often protected by high cliffs or steep slopes from the mass tourism.

Lizards and birding along the Trieste Gulf

The Isonzo river signs, on many aspects, a border between the North-italian plains of Po valley and the Balkan ranges that connect the Karst with Dinaric Alps and Dalmatia. That’s why the Trieste and Karst area is so special in Italy, because is often nearer to Slovenia and Croatia, about flora and fauna, than to the remaining part of the peninsula.

I visited the area in order to localize a couple of dalmatian lizards that here reach their north-eastern limit of distribution, but I enjoyed there the very rich avifauna as well.

In the Fagagna wet meadows

North-eastern Italian lowland hosts only a few residual patches of peat bogs and wet meadows: they are some of the remaining fragments of the ancestral Po valley, survived to the spread of agriculture and to the recent aggressive overbuilding. Their ancient origin has allowed some amazing living beings to survive till recent times in these rare and precious micro-habitats.