Italy Birdwatching 2025: The Flyway, the Sites and the Endemic Species

How Eleonora's Falcon was named — and why its breeding timing is uniquely evolved

Eleonora's Falcon (Falco eleonorae) is named after Eleonora d'Arborea (1347-1402), the Sardinian judge-princess who issued the Carta de Logu (1392) — the first European law to protect birds of prey, including specifically the falcon nests on Sardinian coastal cliffs. The law made it illegal to disturb falcon nests during the breeding season on pain of a silver fine — an extraordinarily forward-looking conservation measure 600 years before the modern conservation movement. The Carta de Logu remained in force in Sardinia until Napoleonic law replaced it in 1827. Eleonora's Falcon has one of the most specifically evolved breeding adaptations of any European rapture: it breeds in late summer (July-October, far later than all other European raptors) specifically to feed its chicks on the autumn passerine migration — the tiny warblers, flycatchers, and pipits that pass through the Mediterranean islands in September-October. The falcon essentially "farms" the migration, catching migrants on the wing to provision chicks whose timing is precisely synchronized with the migration peak. The species was named in honor of Eleonora d'Arborea by the ornithologist Alberto della Marmora in 1839.