ABSTRACT – Hemeroby is an indicator widely used in plant ecology that indicates the level of disturbance of the optimal habitat for a species. Hemeroby is scaled on a range of ten or five point scores, higher scores of hemeroby meaning higher level of disturbance. In this paper, we introduced two metrics of hemeroby: the species hemeroby score (HS), as a proxy for the suitability to specific disturbed habitats, and hemerobiotic diversity (H’H), as a proxy for species generalism, this last synthesizing the numbers and frequency of habitats of different hemeroby where a species occurs. We related HS and H’H of 75 common breeding bird species to their regional range of occupancy in Latium (central Italy). H’H is positively correlated with regional range of occupancy. Grouping data in categories, we observed a significant trend in regional range of occupancy, increasing from species with low H’H (i.e. specialized) to species with progressively higher H’H (i.e. generalists). Nevertheless, only the interior forest species linked to pristine habitats seem separated showing a significantly lower averaged regional range of occupancy. Interestingly, synanthropic species may be considered specialized taxa of highly anthropized habitats. These data have implications for conservation: many of forest interior species have yet included in list of sensitive common species so that our data confirm their role as indicators of disturbance.