Upcher's warbler | Hippolais languida

Voice

The song is remarkably musical for a tree warbler: a run of short Acrocephalus-like phrases with clear, almost fluty notes among them, slower and purer than the hurried babble of Eastern Olivaceous. It often starts from a bush top and turns into a song flight — a slow flapping climb, then a diagonal glide down on spread wings. The call is a deep, soft tcheck or tak, often in short series. Song from late April into July, including the middle of the day.

Identification

Larger and greyer than the olivaceous warblers, with a long heavy bill showing an orange lower mandible and a pale supercilium above a white eye-ring. Head and neck are distinctly grey and contrast with the browner mantle. Underparts white with a cream or grey-brown wash along the flanks. The tail decides it: long, broad and blackish-brown with white edges and tips to the outer feathers, so that it looks darker than the back — in the olivaceous warblers the tail is the same brown as the back. A pale panel shows on the secondaries; legs are stout and fleshy grey. Sexes alike.

Confusion species

Icterine and Melodious Warblers are settled at once: both are smaller, greener or yellower, and never show a blackish tail. The real problem is Eastern Olivaceous Warbler, which breeds alongside it in Turkey and the Levant: that bird is smaller and more compact, warmer brown, lacks the grey head against a brown mantle, has a tail concolorous with the back, and dips its tail downwards only, never sideways. Olive-tree Warbler is a size larger, heavier still in the bill, and has a pale grey rather than dark tail.

Habitat

Dry and semi-desert slopes with scattered low bushes, stony hills, wadis with tamarisk and oleander, and field edges with vines and fruit trees. It always needs bushes to nest in and to sing above, but no woodland; in the mountains of Turkey and Iran it reaches well over two thousand metres.

Range and movements

Breeds in south-east Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, in Armenia and Azerbaijan, and eastwards through Iran to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Within the area of this guide it is therefore an ordinary breeding bird of the eastern margin and not a vagrant at all: it hardly ever strays into Europe. It winters in eastern Africa, from Sudan and Ethiopia to Kenya and Somalia.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

May, mid-morning, on a stony slope with scattered bushes in the Golan, the Beqaa valley or south-east Anatolia. Scan the tallest bush on the slope: the singing bird is usually right on top of it, in full view. Keep watching until it moves the tail — the sideways swing, rather than a simple downward dip, is the mark that separates it from the olivaceous warblers.

Conservation status

Not threatened and still widespread across its range, with a stable population. Overgrazing of the shrub layer, the conversion of dry slopes to irrigated farmland and the flooding of valleys behind new dams eat into its habitat locally, but its taste for poor, half-abandoned ground leaves it less exposed than most birds of the same country.