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Eurasian Wren
Troglodytes troglodytes | Winterkoning | Chochín común
One of Europe's smallest birds carries one of its loudest voices: the Wren blasts out its song from dark bramble thickets in midwinter. Males build several cock nests, of which the female picks one and lines it.
Voice
The song is an explosion of clear, hard notes with a characteristic rattle or trill somewhere in the middle, a few seconds long and astonishingly loud for the size; heard from January into July and again in late summer. Alarm is a hard, rattling tserrrr and a dry ticking tek-tek-tek.
Recording: Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Tiny, rounded and warm rufous-brown, finely barred dark on wings, flanks and tail, with a pale supercilium and a thin, slightly decurved bill. The stubby tail is usually cocked vertically. Flight is low, fast and whirring from cover to cover. Sexes alike; juveniles are more diffusely marked with a mottled head.
Confusion species
For beginners Dunnock is the trap: it is larger and slimmer, grey on head and breast, streaked on the back, with a longer tail that is not cocked, and it shuffles mouse-like over open ground. Treecreeper climbs trunks, shows white underparts and a long curved bill.
Habitat
Structured undergrowth: bramble tangles, hedge banks, stream valleys with fallen timber, reed fringes, root plates and neglected garden corners. Also on treeless rocky coasts and islands, and in mountains up to the dwarf-scrub zone, wherever dark cavities and cover exist.
Range and movements
From Ireland to the Urals and south into North Africa. In the Netherlands one of the commonest breeding birds year-round, in almost every garden and wood. In Iberia it breeds mainly in the humid north and in the mountains, dropping to lower, milder ground in winter, when birds appear in gardens and riverside woods.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
February and March are best: song is in full flow and leaves are still absent. Follow the sound, stand still and wait; the bird will scold its way to within a few metres. In hard winters look for communal roosts in nest boxes or ivy masses, where dozens huddle together.
Conservation status
Abundant and not threatened, but numbers swing violently. Prolonged frost with snow cover can wipe out much of the population, with recovery following within a few years. Locally the tidying away of dead wood, hard bank management and the loss of scrub and hedgerows reduce the cover it depends on.