Passerines | Passeriformes

Families in this order

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• ▸True songbirds | PasseriWhat sets this group apart within the order is that the song is not fixed but has to be learned: in its first months a young bird takes its model from adult neighbours, so that one species sounds different from district to district. The voice box carries the full number of muscle pairs for the job; some species produce two notes at once, others take whole passages from the sounds around them. Song serves both to mark out a territory and to win a mate, and many species keep a fixed repertoire of dozens of phrases for it. With over four thousand species the group makes up the greater part of the order; it is found across the whole world and is richest in forms in Australia and its surroundings.

  • ▸Crows and allies | CorvidesLarge, heavily built birds by songbird standards, with a powerful and often slightly hooked bill, and a diet of whatever is available: insects and fruit, but also eggs, nestlings and carrion. For their size they have the largest brains of any birds, which shows in their memory for places, the way they handle objects and the ease with which they imitate sounds. They are long-lived, often stay with the same partner for years, and live in family parties in which last year's young help to raise a new brood. The clutch is small and the nest a solid cup high in a tree or shrub. The group is centred on Australasia and the islands north of Australia, and most of its species stay in their area all year.

    • Bushshrikes | Malaconotidae1 speciesShrike-like songbirds of scrub and thorn, with a heavy hook-tipped bill and strong legs used to pin down large insects, lizards and nestlings. Unlike the true shrikes they rarely take an open perch; they shuffle through the densest part of the bush and are far more often heard than seen. Sound is the family's mark: clear whistled phrases that male and female interlock as a duet, timed so tightly that it sounds like one bird — a way of holding a territory and a pair bond from inside cover. Many species wear a black cap or a black mask over a plain back; the flight is short and heavy, from bush to bush.
    • Vireos | Vireonidae1 speciesVireos are small to medium songbirds of the Americas; none breeds in Europe, but a few North American migrants reach the Atlantic coasts in autumn on westerly gales. In looks they fall between a warbler and a small shrike: greenish or grey above, pale below, with a stouter bill than a warbler's and a small hook at the tip. Head and eye-stripe pattern is the key feature. They move slowly and deliberately through the canopy, picking caterpillars and other insects from the leaves and taking berries outside the breeding season. The nest is a deep cup slung in a fork. They are tireless singers that keep calling all day, even through the midday heat.
    • Orioles | Oriolidae1 speciesMedium-sized canopy birds with a fairly heavy, slightly curved bill tipped with a small hook, able to deal with hairy caterpillars as well as soft fruit. Males are bright yellow or orange with black, females and young birds greenish and finely streaked; that vivid yellow is remarkably hard to pick out among sunlit leaves. The nest is a hanging cup, woven like a hammock between the two arms of a horizontal fork high in a broadleaved tree. They stay in the crown, and clear fluting whistles give them away long before the bird itself does.
    • Shrikes | Laniidae9 speciesA hooked bill with a tooth in the cutting edge of the upper mandible, used to kill prey at the neck: these are songbirds that hunt like raptors, but with ordinary songbird feet that cannot hold prey down. That is why they impale insects, lizards and mice on thorns or barbed wire, to pin them while feeding and to store them. They sit still and upright on a lookout above open ground with scattered bushes and drop on prey from there; a black mask, a large head and a long tail belong to nearly every species. The nest is a sturdy cup deep in a thorny shrub.
    • Crows and jays | Corvidae15 speciesThe largest and heaviest-built songbirds, with a powerful all-purpose bill, bristly feathers over the nostrils and strong legs used for walking as much as hopping. They eat almost anything, hide food for later and remember where they put it; their brains are the largest for their size of any bird, which shows in how readily they exploit tools, carrion and human habits. True song is absent — the calls are harsh and grating — but many species mimic other sounds. Pairs stay together for years, build a bulky stick nest, and the sexes look alike.
  • ▸Sparrows and allies | PasseridesSet against the crow group is the other half of the songbirds: mostly small, lightly built birds with a fine bill, taking insects, seeds and nectar from leaf, twig and ground. They lay larger clutches, often raise two or three broods a year, and build an open cup or a closed nest in cover, in a hole or against a wall. In the north most of them leave as soon as the insects run out, and the territory is claimed again with song in spring. Outside Australasia this is by far the most numerous group of songbirds: practically every songbird you see in Europe belongs here.

    • ▸Tits, swallows and warblers | SylviidaSmall insect-eaters with a thin, pointed bill, gathering their food from among leaves and twigs or catching it in the air. The plumage is green, grey or brown, with little difference between male and female and often less still between closely related species - this is the group in which a birder gets more from the ear than from the eye. The nest sits deep in vegetation, in a hole, or as a closed ball among the stems, and the clutch is large for a songbird. Many species winter south of the Sahara or in southern Asia, and outside the breeding season they move through scrub and canopy in mixed parties.

      • Penduline tits | Remizidae2 speciesVery small birds with a fine, sharply pointed conical bill for picking small insects, spiders and seeds from reed, willow and poplar. The family's hallmark is the nest: a hanging purse of plant down and spider silk felted around drooping twigs, with a short spout entrance at the side, so nothing can reach it from below. Such a nest may take weeks to build, yet the brood is usually raised by one parent alone, the other leaving to start again elsewhere. The voice is a thin, high whistle that is easily overlooked.
      • Tits | Paridae10 speciesSmall, compact birds with a short strong bill and powerful legs; they forage acrobatically at the tips of twigs, hanging upside down, and wedge a seed under one foot to hammer it open. Almost all species nest in a cavity and lay large clutches there — eight to twelve eggs is normal, more than most songbirds manage. They store food in bark crevices and moss, and outside the breeding season travel in noisy mixed flocks through the wood. The head pattern is sharply drawn in every species and is the dependable field mark.
      • Bearded reedlings | Panuridae1 speciesA family of a single species, and there is little outward likeness to point to: its separate place rests on skull structure and on hereditary data, which set it beside the larks rather than with the tits or warblers it was long filed under. What marks it is its tie to extensive old reedbed: a small orange-yellow bill, a very long graduated tail and feet that grip two stems at once. In summer these birds take insects, in winter reed seed; in autumn the muscular stomach thickens and they swallow grit to grind that hard seed. They nest low in the reeds, two to four times a year, and male and female differ in head pattern from the nest onward.
      • Larks | Alaudidae20 speciesGround birds in brown and sand, streaked all over and built to walk rather than hop: the hind claw is long and almost straight, and the back of the tarsus carries a row of separate scales instead of the smooth plate other songbirds have there. Almost all species sing on the wing, climbing or hovering, sometimes for minutes on end above ground that offers no song post. The nest is a scrape on bare soil lined with grass, and the chicks walk away from it before they can fly, which limits losses when the field is cut. Bills range from short and heavy for seed to long and curved for digging in the soil.
      • Cisticolas | Cisticolidae2 speciesSmall warblers of grass, marsh and low scrub, mostly warm brown and streaked above, with short rounded wings and a graduated tail that is often held cocked and is shorter in breeding plumage than in winter. The nest is the family's signature: living grass blades or leaves stitched together with spider silk and caterpillar silk into a hidden purse that keeps growing with the plant holding it. The song is simple and endlessly repeated, usually delivered in a bounding display flight over the territory, since such ground offers no song post. The family is centred on Africa; only a single species reaches the Mediterranean coast and beyond.
      • Reed warblers | Acrocephalidae18 speciesPlain brown to olive warblers without wing bars, with a long bill, broad and flat at the base and set with bristles, a smoothly sloping forehead and long toes that grasp two upright stems at once. They climb and creep through dense waterside growth and scrub and are known above all by the song: a loud, rhythmic, grating chatter, much repeated and packed with imitations of other species, delivered by day and by night. The nest is a deep cylindrical basket woven around standing stems so that it can sway in the wind without tipping. All the European species are long-distance migrants to Africa and are present here for only three or four months.
      • Grasshopper warblers | Locustellidae5 speciesExtremely skulking brown birds that creep mouse-like through the lowest layer of reed, rank growth and sedge, and would rather run off than fly. The build matches: short rounded wings, a broad graduated tail and strikingly long undertail coverts. The song is mechanical — an even reeling or ticking trill sustained for minutes, which seems to shift about as the bird turns its head, so that it is hard to place. The nest sits on or just above the ground under overhanging stems and is reached on foot; the sexes look alike.
      • Swallows and martins | Hirundinidae8 speciesBirds that take all their food in the air and are built entirely for it: long pointed wings, a very short flat bill with an enormous gape, and small weak feet on short legs, good for perching but hardly for walking. They drink and bathe by skimming low over water. The nest is a cup or closed flask of mud pellets against a wall, a self-dug tunnel in a steep bank, or a cavity — often in colonies. They are migrants that gather over reedbeds and wires in late summer; unlike the swifts they resemble in flight, these are ordinary songbirds that will settle on a wire.
      • Long-tailed tits | Aegithalidae1 speciesVery small birds with a tiny stubby bill and a tail longer than the whole body, so that they look more like a ball on a stick than like a bird. The nest is a closed oval of moss and lichen bound with spider silk and lined with hundreds to over a thousand feathers; its wall stretches as the brood grows. They live in family parties all year: birds whose own nest has failed help feed at another, and at night the party roosts pressed together along a branch. They keep contact with thin, insistent rattling calls that announce the flock before it appears.
      • Bush warblers | Cettiidae2 speciesSmall, stocky, dull brown birds of dense damp scrub, with rounded wings, a rounded tail and rarely more than a pale supercilium for marking; they keep low in cover and are heard far more often than seen. The song is out of all proportion to the bird: a sudden loud burst of a few seconds, with long silences between. Males are clearly heavier and longer-winged than females and often hold more than one female in a territory whose broods they do not help to raise. In part of the family the tail has ten feathers instead of the usual twelve; the family itself was only delimited this century, after molecular work showed these birds did not belong with the other warblers.
      • Leaf warblers | Phylloscopidae17 speciesSmall, slender warblers with a thin pointed bill, green to grey-green above and pale below, usually with a supercilium and sometimes with wing bars. The sexes are alike and the species differ so little that the simple, much repeated song is in practice the most reliable mark. They are in constant motion through canopy and scrub: gleaning leaves, hovering at a leaf tip, snatching an insect in mid-air. The nest is domed with a side entrance and sits on or just above the ground, even in species that otherwise spend their whole lives high in the trees.
      • Bulbuls | Pycnonotidae4 speciesMedium-sized songbirds with soft, loose, almost downy plumage, a short, slender and slightly decurved bill with stiff bristles at its base, and short, weak legs: bulbuls hardly walk, working through cover in hops instead. Long hair-like feathers grow on the nape, and many species can raise the crown feathers into a pointed crest. The diet is largely fruit, with blossom, nectar and insects added, which makes them among the most important seed dispersers in warm regions. They live in pairs or noisy parties along forest edges, in scrub, orchards and gardens, like to perch high and in the open, and deliver a short whistled or chattering phrase from there. The nest is a rather thin cup in the fork of a shrub or low tree, and both parents feed the young.
      • Sylvia warblers | Sylviidae22 speciesSturdier than the leaf warblers, with a thicker bill and a stronger head; these are birds of scrub, thorn hedge and maquis that move low and under cover. Many have a bare eye-ring and a strikingly coloured iris, and males wear a dark or contrasting head while females stay browner — an unusual difference among songbirds of this size. They take insects in summer, but from late summer switch largely to fruit, which fuels their migration and spreads a great many seeds. The nest is a neat, thin-walled cup low in a bush; males often build several unfinished nests before one is taken into use.
      • Parrotbills | Paradoxornithidae2 speciesSmall, round-bodied birds with a very long graduated tail and the bill that names the family: short, deep, laterally compressed and strongly curved, a parrot's bill in miniature. With it they shell hard seeds and split open reed stems and bamboo to reach the insects inside. Powerful feet grip vertical stems, so they clamber upward through reed, tall grass, bamboo and scrub; the flight is short and fluttering, and most species stay in the same patch for life. Outside the breeding season they move about in twittering parties, and male and female look alike. The nest is a deep cup woven low between the stems.
      • Laughingthrushes | Leiothrichidae3 speciesMedium-sized songbirds of the dense understorey of Asian woodland, with strong legs, short rounded wings and a long graduated tail: birds that clamber and hop more than they fly. The bill is stout and slightly decurved, serving equally for insects and for fruit, both taken on the ground and in thickets. They live in noisy parties for most of the year, preen one another about the head and help at each other's nests; the voice is a sustained chattering and cackling that in many species runs into a communal chorus — the sound that gave the laughingthrushes their name. Plain brown species stand beside boldly patterned heads and wings. The nest is a sturdy cup low in a bush.
    • ▸Thrushes, flycatchers and starlings | MuscicapidaSongbirds that work from a fixed post: sitting upright they watch about them and drop onto whatever moves, or else pick insects off bark, branch and ground. The legs are sturdy, the bill is broad at the base and set with bristles, and the song is loud and musical, with a great many phrases run one after another. The first plumage of the young is spotted or scaled, even in species that are plain as adults. In late summer and winter most of them turn largely to berries and other soft fruit - the reason thrushes shift west en masse in a hard winter.

      • Waxwings | Bombycillidae1 speciesCompact songbirds with a strikingly soft, dense plumage without spot or streak, a crest, a black mask and a short bill with a wide gape. The red, horny plates at the tips of the secondaries, which give the family its name, occur in no other group of birds; the tail ends in a bright yellow or red band. For most of the year they live on berries, swallowed whole and passed through a short gut in minutes, so that a flock can work through an enormous quantity; in the breeding season they take insects on the wing over water. They defend no feeding territory and have no true song, only high silvery trills that keep the flock together. The nest is a loose cup of twigs, moss and lichen on a side branch, and the breeding area shifts from year to year with the berry crop.
      • Hypocolius | Hypocoliidae1 speciesA family of one species, and not for want of looking: the hypocolius has no living close relative. The plumage is soft and plain ash-grey, almost unmarked, with a long tail ending in a black band and primaries tipped black and white that only show in flight; the male adds a black mask carried back round the neck as a band. The bill is short and faintly hooked, made for fruit: dates and the berries of toothbrush tree and salt tree make up nearly the whole diet. Outside the breeding season they wander the oases in parties of ten to fifty, dropping silently into a tree, stripping it and moving on. The flight is undulating and the posture on a branch strikingly upright.
      • Kinglets | Regulidae3 speciesVery small, round-bodied birds with a short tail and a needle-fine bill, used to pick springtails, aphids and spider eggs from among needles and bark crevices, usually while hanging beneath a branch tip and sometimes hovering briefly at the foliage. The crown is the family's signature: a yellow to fiery red stripe bordered with black on both sides, raised in display and in threat, and the head pattern is what separates the species. The voice sits exceptionally high, around eight kilohertz, high enough that older observers no longer hear the family at all. The nest is a deep hanging cup of moss, lichen and spider silk slung beneath a conifer branch and lined with hundreds of feathers, holding eight to eleven eggs — a large clutch for so small a body. On winter nights the birds huddle together to save heat.
      • Wallcreepers | Tichodromidae1 speciesA single species, the Wallcreeper, which lives on vertical rock as treecreepers live on bark. The plumage is slate grey, but the wing coverts are crimson and the flight feathers black with round white spots, so the bird lights up against a bare face at every wingbeat. The wings are strikingly broad and rounded and carry a slow, irregular, fluttering flight that along a cliff suggests a large butterfly rather than a passerine. The bill is long, thin and strongly decurved, and draws spiders and insects out of narrow cracks and from behind cushions of moss. There is no stiff propping tail: the bird grips with long toes and big hooked claws and keeps its balance by flicking its wings half open and shut without pause, which at range is the surest mark of all. The nest is set deep in a rock crevice or under an overhang, beyond the reach of predators, and both parents feed the young on the face. The family is tied to high, crevice-rich cliffs and to the screes below them; in winter the birds drop from the high mountains to lower crags, gorges, quarries and old masonry.
      • Nuthatches | Sittidae5 speciesSmall, compact birds with a big head, a short neck and a short, square-cut tail, and a long, straight, sharply pointed bill used like a chisel in crevices of bark. The legs are short and heavy and carry very long, strongly curved claws; with these they climb, and alone among European birds they walk head-first down a trunk as easily as up it, using the tail for no support at all. They forage on trunks and branches and, in a few species, on bare rock faces, prising insects and spiders out of cracks; in winter they turn to nuts and seeds, which they wedge into a bark crevice and hack open with the bill, and which they also store away. All species nest in a cavity, and characteristic of the family is that the entrance is plastered up with wet mud and clay until exactly one bird will pass; the rock nuthatches build the whole nest that way, a jug-shaped structure fixed to a rock face. The voice is loud, clear and whistled, with simple repeated notes and accelerating trills that carry far through woodland and gorge. The sexes look much alike and differ at most in the depth of the brown on flanks and vent or in the sharpness of a black cap.
      • Treecreepers | Certhiidae2 speciesSmall, brown-spangled birds that climb a trunk like a mouse, always from the bottom upward and in a loose spiral around the stem; at the top they let go and fly to the foot of the next tree to begin again. The tail is stiff and pointed, with strong shafts, and is set against the bark at every step as a third point of support, so the bird hangs back from the trunk and never climbs head-down. The bill is thin, long and curved like a pair of forceps and works into bark crevices after spiders, springtails, eggs and pupae; the toes are long and the claws strongly hooked. The nest is a platform of twigs carrying a cup of bark, moss and feathers, tucked behind a hanging plate of bark or in a narrow crack. To roost, a bird gouges an oval hollow in soft fibrous bark with its bill and presses into it head-inward, alone or, in frost, many at once. The voice sits very high, around six to eight kilohertz, high enough that older observers regularly miss the family altogether. The European species resemble one another so closely that call and song settle a record in the field more often than plumage does.
      • Wrens | Troglodytidae1 speciesVery small, rounded birds with short rounded wings and a short tail often carried cocked, and a fine slightly decurved bill for teasing insects out of crevices. They move mouse-like through the lowest layer of wood, hedgebank, wall and stream side, slipping into root plates and log piles, and keep to the ground more than to the bush. For so small a body the song is extraordinarily loud: a long hard phrase with a rattle in it, to be heard the year round. The nest is a domed ball with a side entrance, of which the male builds several for the female to choose from; apart from a single species the whole family lives in the Americas.
      • Mockingbirds and thrashers | Mimidae1 speciesMedium-sized, slim songbirds with a long tail, sturdy legs and a slightly decurved bill, much used on the ground in leaf litter: turning leaves, chopping into the soil and rummaging under bushes. The family takes its name from mimicry; many species pick up the calls and song phrases of their neighbours and work frogs, insects and mechanical noises in among them. The song is long and repetitive, each phrase delivered two or three times over before the bird moves to the next, and a male's repertoire goes on growing for as long as he lives. They defend their territories fiercely and in the open, taking on cats, snakes and people that come too near the nest. The nest is a solid twig cup low in a dense, often thorny shrub. In winter many species switch to berries and hold a feeding territory then as well. The family is confined to the Americas and the Caribbean; not one species occurs naturally in Europe, and the few European records are of transatlantic vagrants.
      • Starlings | Sturnidae6 speciesRobust birds with a straight pointed bill and strong legs; they walk purposefully over the ground rather than hop. They feed by pushing the closed bill into the turf and forcing it open there — the jaw muscles are built for it, and the eyes are set far enough forward for the bird to look down along the open bill. In many species the plumage is metallic, a gloss that comes from feather structure rather than pigment, often flecked with pale spots. They are thoroughly social: flocks while feeding, communal roosts, and nest holes close together; many species are accomplished mimics.
      • Dippers | Cinclidae1 speciesSquat birds with a stubby cocked tail, powerful legs with long toes and strong claws, and exceptionally dense, greasy plumage carrying far more feathers than a songbird of the same size usually does; the preen gland above the tail is proportionally enormous and supplies the oil that keeps the feathers waterproof. They dive in from a rock or straight out of flight, row underwater with short rounded wings, and walk along the bed into the current with the head down, so that the flow presses them against the gravel. Below the surface a flap closes the nostrils, a transparent third eyelid slides across the eye, and a heavy skeleton with little air in the bones holds them down. They feed on caddis, mayfly and stonefly larvae and small crustaceans taken from under the stones. The nest is a domed ball of moss with a side entrance, built behind a waterfall, in a bank wall or under a bridge, often reachable only through the spray. The song is loud and sustained and pitched exactly where it will carry over the roar of the water; both sexes sing, right through the year. Worldwide the family holds only five species, every one of them tied to fast-flowing water.
      • Thrushes | Turdidae12 speciesMedium-sized birds with an upright carriage, long strong legs and a moderately long slender bill. On the ground they work in short stages — a few hops, a halt to look and listen, then a strike — and from late summer into winter they turn largely to berries and fallen fruit, which is why whole populations shift southwest when the ground freezes. The song is loud and fluting, built of repeated motifs and delivered from a high open perch, above all at dawn and dusk. The nest is a solid cup, in many species plastered inside with mud; young birds are spotted even where the adults are plain.
      • Chats and flycatchers | Muscicapidae42 speciesWhat these birds share outwardly is limited: they are grouped together chiefly on skull structure and hereditary data, which is why the flycatchers now sit in one family with the wheatears, redstarts and nightingales formerly placed among the thrushes. The common ground is a small body with a thin pointed bill bristled at the base, and insect catching from a lookout: one kind darts up after a flying insect, another drops from a low perch onto the ground. A striking number carry colour in the tail — rufous, white sides or a black-and-white pattern — and flash it with a jerk on landing. They nest in holes and crevices or in a well-hidden cup, and nearly all European species winter in Africa.
    • ▸Finches, sparrows and buntings | PasseridaSeed is the staple of the adults here: the bill is either conical or fine and tweezer-like, food is gathered walking or hopping on the ground, and the birds have to drink every day. The young, even so, are fed on insects almost everywhere, including in species whose adults eat nothing but seed. Male and female differ in plumage more often and more strongly than in the other groups, and the song is short and repetitive, delivered from an open perch or in a song flight over open country. Outside the breeding season many species gather in flocks wherever seed lies: stubble fields, rough ground and feeding places by the house.

      • Sunbirds | Nectariniidae1 speciesSmall, sharp-featured birds with a thin curved bill and a tongue rolled into a tube at the tip and frayed at the very end, used to draw nectar from a flower as through a straw. Unlike the hummingbirds they resemble but are not related to, they almost always drink perched, clinging to the flower stem and hovering for at most a second. The glossy blue, green and purple of the males is not pigment but structural colour: layers within the feather that split the light, so that a turning bird flips from black to metal. Bright pectoral tufts sit at each side of the breast and are flicked out only in display or threat. The nest is a hanging purse of plant fibre and spider silk with a side entrance and a porch, built by the female alone.
      • Weavers | Ploceidae2 speciesSmall to medium seed-eaters with a short, heavy conical bill and strong feet, which do not pile their nests up but knot them. The male starts with a ring: he tears a narrow strip from a reed or palm leaf, loops it round a stem or thin branch and pulls the end through with his bill. From that ring he works forward and back until a closed globe stands there, the entrance at the bottom or the top and in some species a short spout below it; bill and foot serve as the loom, and the work takes two or three days. The female does not build but inspects and lines the inside with down and seed heads; if she rejects it, the nest is pulled apart and begun again. A male builds nest after nest for successive females, and a good reedbed or tree carries tens to hundreds of them together.
      • Indigobirds and whydahs | Viduidae1 speciesSmall seed-eaters with a thick, often coral-red conical bill, which build no nest and raise no young of their own. The female lays her white eggs in the nests of waxbills; the host pair incubates them and feeds the strange chick alongside its own, for nothing is turned out of the nest. This works because the chick matches its host down to the details: the same spots, blotches and coloured papillae at the back of the gaping bill, the same begging posture and the same begging call as the nest mates beside it. Each species is tied to its own circle of hosts, and the males take the song of their host into their own repertoire, so that females come to the right species. In the breeding season males wear black and white and, in some, greatly elongated tail feathers, used in a display hovering above the female; out of that season every species is streaked and sparrow-like, separable in practice only by bill colour.
      • Waxbills | Estrildidae6 speciesSmall to very small seed-eaters with a short, thick conical bill — bright coral red in many species, silver-grey or blue-black in others — a compact body and short, rounded wings. They live in parties the year round and take their food from the seed head itself, clambering, hanging or riding the stem down under their own weight, and from the ground beneath. The nest is a closed ball of interwoven grass with an entrance at the side, often drawn out into a short tube, set low in a tussock, a thorn bush or dense reed; both parents build and take turns to incubate. The nestlings carry a fixed pattern of black spots and lines at the back of the gaping bill, with coloured papillae at the gape that light up in the dark of the nest and point the parents to the food. That food is seed brought up softened in the crop and given out one chick at a time.
      • Accentors | Prunellidae4 speciesSmall, compact birds with a sparrow-like body and dull grey-brown, streaked plumage, but carrying a thin, straight, sharply pointed bill with which they take insects, spiders and springtails from leaf litter, moss and rock crevices; in winter they switch to fine seeds. They forage on foot, creeping and shuffling over the ground in short steps with a slightly hunched back, rarely far from cover, a nervous flick running through wing and tail every few seconds. The head pattern separates the species: a grey hood, a black-spotted throat, a broad pale supercilium. The mating system is the family's signature: many species live not in pairs but in groups of two or more males with one or more females sharing a single range, chasing one another continuously and displaying with one wing raised and quivering; the care of the young is then divided among several birds. The eggs are unmarked blue. One genus, confined to Eurasia and North Africa, centred on the mountains of Asia.
      • Sparrows | Passeridae10 speciesStocky, short-legged seed-eaters with a heavy conical bill whose cutting edges are sharp enough to crack a grain of wheat. The tongue carries a small extra bone, the preglossale, which serves as an anvil: the seed is turned against the palate, the husk peeled off and the kernel swallowed, the whole job taking a second. Adults live on seed; the young are raised on caterpillars and aphids. The nest is an untidy domed ball of grass, straw and feathers stuffed into a cavity — a tree hole, a wall crevice, a roof tile or another bird's abandoned nest — and usually stands in a loose colony, with two to four broods a year. Bathing is done in dry dust: the bird kicks out a scrape and works the sand through its plumage. Several species live beside people all year, in villages, farmyards, cities and grain stores, where spilt feed and the buildings themselves supply both food and nest holes.
      • Wagtails and pipits | Motacillidae18 speciesSlender, long-legged songbirds that walk rather than hop: the foot pushes off, the head nods with it, and the long tail is pumped up and down without a pause — in the wagtails hard enough to rock the whole body. The bill is thin, straight and pointed, made for picking insects off the ground, off wet stones or out of the air; the leg is long and fine, and in the pipits the claw of the hind toe is greatly lengthened, nearly as long as the toe itself, which gives purchase in grass and sedge. Two appearances on one frame: the wagtails boldly marked in black, white, grey and yellow, the pipits brown and streaked and separated from each other mainly on call and wing formula. The nest is a cup on the ground, hidden under a tussock or in a niche, and the song is delivered in the air: up, sing, and down again on a parachuting descent.
      • Finches | Fringillidae33 speciesThe conical bill is the mark of the family: seed is not swallowed but husked, held in a groove in the palate while the lower mandible slides the coat off. The heavier the bill, the harder the kernel it can deal with, so its shape tells from species to species what the bird depends on. Outside the breeding season they range in flocks over seed-rich fields, woods and shores, with a bounding flight and persistent contact calls that identify them at a distance. Unlike most songbirds, many species feed their young not on insects but on regurgitated seed, carried in a pouch of the gullet.
      • Longspurs and snow buntings | Calcariidae2 speciesThe family is named for the hind toe: the claw is long and almost straight, longer than the toe itself, and belongs to birds that live walking on flat, treeless ground. They are stocky seed-eaters with a short conical bill, long pointed wings and a fast, low flight, and they walk rather than hop. The family is small and wholly northern: open tundra and boulder field in summer, coast, saltmarsh and stubble in winter. Summer and winter plumages diverge further than in almost any other passerine family — the crisply marked male of June is a brown, streaked bird by October. With no song post above the plain, the song comes in a short song flight: a climb, then a glide down on stiff wings. The nest sits on the ground among stones or in a tussock. The group has been placed in a family of its own since around 2010, apart from the buntings of the Old World.
      • Buntings | Emberizidae17 speciesSeed-eaters with a conical bill as well, but built differently from the finches: the upper mandible is narrower than the lower, with wavy cutting edges, and the palate carries a hard knob against which the seed is rolled and hulled; the gape is also distinctly angled. These are birds of open country — arable, heath, rough grass, mountain slopes — feeding on or just above the ground, though they raise their young on insects. Females and young are brown and streaked, males carry a sharply drawn head pattern; in flight the fairly long tail with white outer feathers catches the eye. The song is short, dry and monotonously repeated from a low lookout, and the nest sits on the ground or low in the vegetation.
      • New World sparrows | Passerellidae4 speciesThe sparrows of the New World: seed-eaters with a short conical bill, strong feet and a fairly long, round-ended tail, mostly brown and streaked above. They feed on the ground in leaf litter and under bushes, with a scratch that marks the whole family: both feet kicked back together in a short hop, so that the litter flies away in one movement and bare, seed-bearing ground is laid open. The head pattern is what identification turns on: crown bands, supercilium, eyestripe and malar stripe in fixed arrangements, while the colour of back and flanks says little. The nest is a cup on the ground or low in a bush, often hidden under a grass tussock. However closely they resemble the buntings of Europe, they have been placed in a family of their own since around 2017, apart from the Emberizidae.
      • New World blackbirds | Icteridae1 speciesAn exclusively American family that does one thing differently with the ordinary songbird bill. The bill is straight, sharp and without a hook, and it is used not to pinch something shut but to lever it open: the bird drives the closed tip into a leaf sheath, a rolled leaf or a crack in the bark and then forces the mandibles apart, laying the food bare. The skull and jaw muscles are built for it, and much of the family feeds this way. In many groups the males are boldly marked in yellow, orange or red against black, while the females stay duller and greener. Several genera weave a deep hanging pouch of plant fibre at the end of a branch, out of reach of climbing predators; others build a cup in reeds or a bush, or lay their eggs in other birds' nests. The family occurs only in the Americas; in Europe it means vagrants and nothing more.
      • New World warblers | Parulidae3 speciesSmall, short-billed insect-eaters of the foliage, nine to fifteen centimetres long and seldom heavier than fifteen grams. They work a crown methodically, picking caterpillars and aphids from the undersides of leaves, hanging at a twig tip or taking an insect in a short sally. The plumage changes strongly with the season: in spring the males carry sharply bounded blocks of yellow, black, blue, orange or chestnut, and after the autumn moult male, female and young bird all stand there greenish and vaguely marked, so that an autumn bird has to be named on a handful of details — undertail coverts, leg colour, wingbars, the rump. Nearly all of them migrate, some for thousands of kilometres and a few straight across the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic, in a body of ten grams. Despite the name they have nothing to do with the warblers of Europe: they are placed in a family of their own, confined to the Americas.
      • Cardinals | Cardinalidae1 speciesAn exclusively American family of medium-sized seed-eaters, recognisable by the bill: heavy, short and purely conical, with a curved upper edge and a broad base, built to crack hard seeds and stones and, in summer, to deal with caterpillars and beetles as well. The second mark is the difference between the sexes. The breeding male carries one saturated colour over almost the whole body — red, deep blue, or blue with chestnut and yellow — while the female is warm brown to olive, with at most a wash of that colour on rump and tail edges. Outside the breeding season the male moults into the same inconspicuous brown, so that autumn and winter birds are barely separable by sex and age and must be worked out on bill shape and tail length. They live in scrub, woodland edge and rank margins, sing from a high post and build an open nest low in a bush.