White wagtail | Motacilla alba

Voice

The call is one of the most-heard and least-recognised sounds in the British countryside: a sharp, disyllabic chis-ick or chizzik, hard and clear, given almost always in flight and usually at the exact moment the bird takes off. Agitated birds shorten it to a single hard note and repeat it quickly. The song is little more than a hurried string of those same call notes with some twittering between, delivered from a ridge tile, a gutter or a fence post; it registers by its pace, not its tune. Song from March into July, the call all year.

Identification

Slim and long, 16.5 to 19 cm, of which nearly half is tail. The tail is black with white outer feathers and is pumped continuously, even when the bird is standing still. Legs and bill are black. The summer male of the British form yarrellii is a study in black and white: black crown and nape running without a break into a black chin, throat and upper breast, a clean white forehead and white cheeks set into that black like a mask, a jet-black back that joins the black nape into one continuous panel, and sooty grey flanks. The female is a duller version with a dark slate back. In winter the great black bib shrinks to a black crescent on the breast and the throat turns white; juveniles are dingy grey-buff with a yellowish face, but they already have the black legs and the wagging tail. The Continental birds, nominate alba, are the ones to look for on spring passage. The male has a clean pale grey back that stands clear of the black nape, so the bird reads as three blocks rather than one: black head, grey saddle, black tail. The flanks are white rather than sooty. In winter plumage the difference narrows and the rump settles it — pale clean grey on alba, so that it contrasts obviously with the black tail; dark grey to blackish on yarrellii, so that rump and tail run together. Flight is deeply undulating, wing bursts between the dips, and almost always accompanied by the call.

Confusion species

Look at the back, the rump and the leg colour and there is little difficulty. Grey wagtail is longer-tailed still, blue-grey above with a yellow-green rump — back and rump are therefore different colours — bright yellow under the tail and, decisively, pink-flesh rather than black legs; it belongs at running water. On pied and white wagtails the rump is the same grey or black as the back and there is no yellow anywhere. Yellow wagtail is shorter-tailed, olive-green above and yellow below, and walks in pasture and crops. Young citrine wagtails really are grey and white, but they show two very broad white wing bars, a pale surround that runs right round the ear coverts, and a shorter tail, and they stand on wet grassland rather than on a forecourt. Pipits share the undulating flight and the white tail sides, but they are brown and streaked, with no black-and-white contrast at all.

Habitat

Short, open, hard ground it can run across, with water somewhere near and a cavity to nest in. In practice: farmyards and muck heaps, car parks and industrial estates, village streets and flat roofs, the margins of ditches, canals and rivers, shingle banks, saltmarsh, locks and bridges, mown lawns and playing fields. The nest goes in a hole — a wall crevice, a stack of pallets, a gap under the tiles, a piece of farm machinery standing idle, a bank revetment — and rarely far from water. In autumn and winter they roost communally in reedbeds, in town trees and in glasshouses, sometimes in hundreds.

Range and movements

Breeds from Iceland and northern Scandinavia to North Africa and from Ireland east deep into Siberia, and south to the Levant and the mountains of Turkey. Britain and Ireland hold the world population of yarrellii almost entirely: a few hundred thousand territories, widespread from city centres to upland farms, with many birds moving south and west in winter and some crossing to Iberia. Continental alba passes through in March and April and again in autumn, chiefly along the coast and on inland gravel pits, and a handful stay to breed in most years. In Iberia the nominate form is a common breeder of the north and centre and an abundant winter visitor everywhere.

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

Where and when to look

Late March on a seawall, a gravel pit shore or a reservoir dam is the moment for alba: males are then at their sharpest and stand out among the local pied wagtails at a glance, because the pale grey saddle catches the light while the black nape does not. Look at nothing but the back and the rump. For the pied wagtail itself, a supermarket car park on a cold evening in November is as good a place as any — and then follow the birds at dusk, because they will lead you to a communal roost in a town tree or a glasshouse where a hundred or more come in over half an hour.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, and green-listed in Britain: pied wagtail wants bare, short, hard ground, and there is more of that than there used to be. Numbers have been broadly stable over recent decades, with a shallow decline in some farmland surveys offset by gains in built-up areas. What costs birds is local and specific: barns sealed and tidy yards cleared of the rubbish piles that hold nest cavities, and insecticide use around farm buildings and watercourses that removes the insects the young are fed on. A loose stack of stones, an idle machine or an open shed door usually keeps the pair.

Scientific name

Motacilla alba Linnaeus, 1758

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Motacilla in that same work. Motacilla is the Latin name for the wagtail; it is really a diminutive of motare 'to move about', though from medieval times -cilla was wrongly taken to mean 'tail'. alba is Latin for 'white', after the black-and-white plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.