“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.