My colleagues wouldn’t know a thrush from a supermarket ‘pollo’, I fear, John.

Thank you for the clarification. I suppose I was confused by the picture of the thrush!

Mio figlio é giornalista per una stazione radio a San Francisco. So quanto lavoro é.

Ciao Claire,
I don’t know much about birds, so you might be right, but I do know that the female blackbird (‘merla’ not ‘merlo’) is brown, as is the bird in the picture. My initial reaction was also ‘That’s not a blackbird!” but the Italian story does, for some reason I have yet to understand, focus on the female. Many of the Italian newspapers have also featured a brown blackbird (though not all – I found one national newspaper with a picture of a male!)

Merlo is the male, and the species I suppose. Merla is the female.