Birdwatching

The country of Ostia Antica, from the side of the excavations up to Capo Due Rami, offers a unique occasion to observe various kinds of birds without much difficulty.

Meeting yew-trees, foxes, porcupines, weasels is as much easy as it is for migratory and permanent birds to find, in the very good position of Ostia Antica, a marvellous moment of standstill during the migration and possibly the opportunity of nest-building. Among the migratory birds, the various kinds of ducks caw out to those ones that use the river as a first category restaurant crowded with elegant lapwings and discreet water-hens. All this is a fascinating attraction for those people who like being silent for a few hours studying the behaviour of these animals from behind a grating made of reeds, just like ethnologists would learn to their good students.

In order to create this opportunity, the country resort Rodrigo de Vivar has arranged some fixed posts inside some small mimetic areas placed in enclosures of 60 mq with maritime and domestic pines, italic and wild olive poplars, strawberry-trees and myrtles, laurels, rosemaries etc.

From these posts, not far from the banks of the Tiber, it is possible to assist to the evolutions of common and real sea-gulls, of lapwings and herons, of rare hawks and grey herons, of blackbirds, flocks and hoopoes, of quails and collar turtle-doves, of tower pigeons, etc. The exotic cormorants competing with the crows. African bee-eaters, rare hawks and even real pheasants could pass between your feet while you are inside the Observation Areas thus giving you a delicate emotion.

At dusk, if you walk along the bank of the Tiber you can meet wild mammals: couples of porcupines, scattered on the bank, looking for worms and rhizomes on the branches of the italic willows; very fast foxes can appear rushing headlong in order to take the best opportunity of hunting small pheasants.

After the birdwatching and the photographic safaris, the guests of Rodrigo de Vivar will refresh with the exquisite and genuine cooking of Adele, our cook, and keep on talking about this unusual and wild adventure near the edge of a famous Roman city: Ostia Antica which, like a pearl inside its shell, finds protection from the chaotic and noisy contemporary world.