Wildlife of Europe: Sicily, the Island at the Crossroads
Between Europe and Africa lies the Mediterranean’s largest island, a refuge for rare species, a highway for migrating birds and a place where ancient isolation still shapes the wildlife.
Sicily is usually sold on its temples, its food and its volcano. Look past the postcards and it is also one of Europe’s most distinctive wildlife landscapes. Its mountains hold trees found nowhere else, its wetlands host flamingos and its skies fill each spring with thousands of migrating raptors. It is also a place where conservation has been won, and lost, in very human ways.
An island apart
At roughly 25,000 square kilometres, Sicily is separated from the Italian mainland by only a few kilometres of water at the Strait of Messina. Over millions of years that narrow barrier, and the island’s position in the central Mediterranean, produced a mix of European and North African influences with a good share of endemic species of its own.
The island’s deep past was stranger still. During the Pleistocene, Sicily was home to dwarf elephants standing about a metre at the shoulder, and to dwarf hippos, animals shrunk by life on an island with limited food. One popular theory holds that their skulls, with the large central nasal opening, helped inspire the legend of the one-eyed Cyclops. The wolf, long the island’s top predator, was hunted out in the early twentieth century, and its absence still shapes the ecosystem.
Etna and the high country
Mount Etna, at about 3,300 metres one of the world’s most active volcanoes, dominates the east. Its slopes climb through citrus groves, oak and chestnut woodland and birch forest to a high desert of black lava. Rare plants have adapted to the harsh ground, including Etna broom (Genista aetnensis) and the endemic Etna violet. Etna Regional Park protects much of the mountain, and the volcano was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2013.
Further west, the Madonie range shelters one of Europe’s great conservation stories. The Nebrodi fir (Abies nebrodensis) is among the rarest conifers on Earth, with only a few dozen mature trees surviving in the wild, all in the Madonie. Park authorities and botanists have worked for decades to collect seed, raise saplings and replant the species, and its survival remains uncertain.
Elsewhere in the south-east, the Sicilian zelkova (Zelkova sicula) was only described in the early 1990s, from a handful of small stands in the Iblei hills. It is a living relic of ancient forests that once covered far more of the Mediterranean.
The mountain woods of the Nebrodi and Madonie also support wildcats, porcupines, martens and a rich bird life, and they are the island’s largest remaining areas of continuous forest.
It is a protected natural area located in Sicily, Italy, encompassing the Madonie mountain range between Palermo and Cefalù.
The Riserva Naturale Orientata dello Zingaro is Sicily’s first natural reserve, located on the northwest coast between Castellammare del Golfo and San Vito Lo Capo.
Wetlands, coast and salt
Sicily’s coastline is a patchwork of dunes, cliffs, lagoons and working salt pans. Greater flamingos gather at coastal wetlands such as Vendicari in the south-east and the salt pans near Trapani in the west, alongside avocets, black-winged stilts and a changing cast of wading birds. In the Trapani salt pans the flamingos feed in the shallow, pink-tinged water, one of the island’s most photogenic sights.
On the island’s beaches, loggerhead turtles still nest in small numbers, and the Sicilian pond turtle (Emys trinacris), now recognised as a species unique to the island, survives in freshwater pools and slow streams.
The Zingaro Reserve on the north-west coast has a special place in Sicilian conservation. When a coastal road threatened to cut through this stretch of wild shoreline in the early 1980s, local protests stopped the bulldozers. In 1981 it became Sicily’s first protected nature reserve, with walking trails in place of tarmac.
A highway in the sky
Each spring, as migrating birds follow the shortest sea crossings from Africa to Europe, Sicily becomes a funnel. At the Strait of Messina, thousands of honey buzzards, along with kites, harriers and other raptors, pass through, usually from mid-April into May. For decades, illegal shooting took a heavy toll. Volunteer camps run by conservation groups, together with stronger enforcement, have helped turn the strait from a killing ground into a place where visitors can watch one of Europe’s great migrations.
Resident raptors are equally important. Sicily is a stronghold for the Bonelli’s eagle, a threatened species that nests on the island’s rocky gorges and cliffs, and it also supports lanner falcons, one of the rarer birds of prey in Europe. Rocky reserves such as Pantalica, with its deep limestone gorges, give them room to breed.
The sea around
Offshore, the Egadi Islands Marine Protected Area is among the largest in Europe. Its beds of Posidonia seagrass, the Mediterranean’s underwater meadows, support fish, octopus and turtles, and occasional sightings of the Mediterranean monk seal suggest this rarest of European seals may be edging back. Dolphins are common, and larger whales, including fin whales, pass through Sicilian waters.
Pressures and promise
Sicily’s wildlife faces serious pressures. Summer wildfires, increasingly severe in a warming climate, have swept through protected woodland. Overgrazing, water scarcity and coastal development continue to erode habitat, and the island is among Italy’s regions most vulnerable to desertification. Illegal hunting has not entirely disappeared.
Yet the same island that has lost its wolves has also shown what determined communities can do. Zingaro was saved by public protest, the Strait of Messina by volunteers, and the Nebrodi fir by decades of patient botanical work. Sicily’s wildlife is vulnerable, but it is not beyond saving.
For visitors, the best advice is to go beyond the coast. Walk in the Madonie in spring, watch the raptors cross the strait, and stand at dusk among the flamingos of the salt pans. Sicily reveals itself slowly, and the island rewards those who pay attention.
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