Western rock nuthatch | Sitta neumayer

Voice

Extraordinarily loud for so small a bird, and in a gorge the sound bounces between the walls. The call is a sharp, hard tsik, fired off in rapid series when the bird is excited. The song is a clear, ringing, accelerating trill, tui-tui-tui-tui, which almost runs into a rattle at the end and carries for hundreds of metres. More often than not you hear the bird from the rim of a gorge long before you find it on the face.

Identification

Bigger and heavier than Eurasian nuthatch, with a longer, stouter bill and a strikingly large head, so that it looks front-heavy. Upperparts plain blue-grey, face and throat white, underparts pale buff warming slightly towards belly and vent but never reaching the rusty orange of the woodland bird. The black eyestripe is long and heavy, broadest behind the eye, fading out on the side of the neck. There is no white in the tail — a useful negative mark. The sexes are alike; juveniles are duller and shorter-billed. Legs and toes are heavy and grey. Everything about the bird is paler and coarser than in its forest relatives.

Confusion species

Eurasian nuthatch is smaller, buff below, shows white spots in the tail and is a bird of trees; the two meet only where woodland touches rock, and there behaviour decides it. Eastern Rock Nuthatch, of eastern Turkey, the Caucasus and Iran, is larger still, with an even broader eyestripe that runs back onto the mantle and a whiter face; in the zone of overlap a good view of bill length and stripe width is needed. Wallcreeper also works cliffs, but is grey with crimson wing panels, has a long curved bill and flits like a butterfly. Treecreepers do not occur in this landscape at all.

Habitat

Bare rock in hot, open country: limestone gorges, cliffs, boulder fields, screes and weathered plateaus, and also old walls, ruins, bridge abutments and quarries. Garrigue and phrygana usually grow between the rocks, and the bird forages there as well, hopping over stones and among the low herbs. From sea level to well over two thousand metres, with mountain birds dropping lower in winter. The nest is the family trademark: a flask- or jug-shaped structure of mud, dung and hair or feathers, plastered against a rock face or into a crevice or an overhung recess, with a short tunnel for an entrance. It takes weeks to build, and the cracks around it are stuffed with feathers, insect wings and snail shells. A nest may be used for years on end.

Range and movements

From Croatia and Montenegro through Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and the whole of Greece, including many islands, and on through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq to the Caucasus and the Zagros of western Iran. Only the easternmost fringe of that range falls outside the map area of this guide. It is resident everywhere; only the highest sites are vacated in winter. In suitable country it is numerous, and in Greece it belongs to the standard cast of every gorge.

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

Where and when to look

Be at a limestone gorge at sunrise — Meteora, the Vikos gorge, the crags above Delphi, the cliffs near Kalloni on Lesvos — and listen first for the accelerating trill. Then find the bird with binoculars on the face: it moves in jerky horizontal runs, often upside down beneath an overhang. Scan the shaded side of overhangs too, for a fist-sized lump of grey-brown mud with a round hole in it. That is the nest, and the bird will never be far away.

Conservation status

Not threatened, with a large range and high densities in suitable country. The species gains more from human structures than it loses to them: ruins, terrace walls and old bridges all provide extra nest sites. Local problems do exist, chiefly the cutting of quarries into gorge walls and the scrubbing over of open rocky slopes once grazing stops. Climbing routes on popular crags can also disturb nests, which sit in exactly the crevices climbers use.