European Stonechat | Saxicola rubicola

Voice

The call explains the name of the whole group: a hard, dry chack or chack-chack, like two pebbles knocked together, almost always preceded by a thin, plaintive hweet — together hweet-chack-chack. It keeps it up for as long as you stand in the territory, and that is usually the first clue the bird is there. The song is a short, fast, slightly scratchy phrase of a second or two, close to Dunnock in pace and tone, delivered from the top of a bush or in a small fluttering song flight. Heard from mid-February into July, most persistently in March and April.

Identification

Small, round and big-headed, with a short tail and short wings, and always upright. The summer male has an entirely black head and throat with no supercilium at all, and behind it a broad white half-collar on each side of the neck that does not meet across the nape. The mantle is blackish-brown and streaked, there is a bold white patch on the wing coverts, and the breast is orange-red, fading to off-white on the belly. The rump is buff-white with dark streaks — a vague pale area, never a large clean white panel. The tail is uniformly dark, with no white. The female is the same bird in brown: the head dark but not black, with a pale throat, the collar duller, the breast warm orange. Autumn birds and juveniles are warmly buff-fringed all over and the head looks brown; the dark unmarked tail and the streaked rump are then what to rely on.

Confusion species

Everything turns on Whinchat — see also the Whinchat species page. In every plumage Whinchat shows a broad creamy supercilium running well behind the eye, which turns the dark cheek into a mask; Stonechat never shows that stripe, not even the female. Flush the bird and watch the tail: Whinchat has a white patch on each side of the tail base, Stonechat's tail is plain dark. Whinchat also looks slimmer, longer-winged and shorter-tailed, and perches on tall herbs more often than on bushes. Season and site settle most cases: in north-west Europe a chat on a damp hay meadow in May is likely a Whinchat, one on a winter moor is always a Stonechat, since Whinchat is then in Africa; in Iberia the calendar is just as decisive, because Stonechat is present there year-round while Whinchat only passes through in April–May and from August to October. Siberian Stonechat makes it a trio in autumn — paler, with a large unstreaked creamy rump, much whiter belly and flanks and black axillaries; it too has its own page. Robin stays in the undergrowth, lacks the white wing patch and has long thin legs; Northern Wheatear is bigger and longer-legged and shows a broad white rump with a black inverted T in the tail.

Habitat

Open, low, dry ground with bushes to perch on and a dense herb layer to nest in: dry and wet heath with bog myrtle, broom and cross-leaved heath, dune scrub and dune slacks, young forestry and clear-fell, rough road and railway verges, sea walls, saltmarsh edges and neglected field margins. The nest is on the ground under a tussock, always within a few metres of a lookout perch. Where verges are cut short every year the bird disappears; where cutting is late or done in rotation it comes back.

Range and movements

From the British Isles east to the Black Sea and Anatolia and south to north-west Africa; northern birds move to south-west Europe and the Maghreb, southern ones stay put. The British Isles hold some 65,000 pairs, concentrated in the western and southern uplands, on coastal heaths and increasingly on inland lowland heath and young plantation. In Iberia it is spread across almost the whole peninsula and the Balearics, common but never abundant, from sea level to nearly two thousand metres, and in winter it is joined by central European birds that occupy the open farmland and river valleys.

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

How and when to look

Walk a heath, a dune slack or a mosaic of fields with hedgerows in late March or early April on a sunny, windless morning and look at the tops of the bushes and along the wire fences. The male will use the same few perches for hours, in full summer plumage, and often allows an approach to ten metres. If you hear the ticking but see nothing, stand still: the bird will come up of its own accord to see who is in its territory. In winter the best odds in north-west Europe are in the foredunes and along saltmarshes, where a single pair will sit on the same bush all season; in Iberia it is easier still, since the bird occupies almost any waste ground, ditch bank or abandoned orchard.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, and in north-west Europe one of the few heath and dune birds that is increasing. The gains come from less intensive verge management, from the removal of encroaching trees on heaths and dunes, and from a run of mild winters — the bird migrates only a short way or not at all, and a severe winter at once costs it part of its population. The lasting risks are small but real: cutting verges short all at once in the middle of the breeding season, clearing rough vegetation along fields and ditches, and heath becoming completely overgrown where it is not managed.

Scientific name

Saxicola rubicola | (Linnaeus, 1766)

Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as [Motacilla] rubicola; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Saxicola was introduced in 1802 by Bechstein. Saxicola is Latin, from saxum 'stone, rock' and -cola 'dweller', from colere 'to inhabit': 'rock dweller', after the open stony ground these birds keep to. rubicola is Latin, from rubus 'bramble' and incola 'dweller': 'dweller among the brambles'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Seine-Maritime, Normandy.