Whinchat | Saxicola rubetra

Voice

The call is a soft whistled tu followed by two dry clicks: tu-tek-tek. It is gentler and less stony than Stonechat's hard chack, but the rhythm is the same and at a distance the two are treacherously alike. The song is a short, quiet, fast phrase of scratchy and whistled notes, often with mimicry of other grassland birds worked in — Skylark, Yellow Wagtail, Redshank — given from a perch or in a brief song flight. Heard from late April into July, loudest in the first week after arrival.

Identification

Small, slim and upright, with a short tail and notably long wings: on a perched bird the primaries reach far down over the tail base. The feature everything turns on is the broad creamy supercilium, running well behind the eye and turning the dark cheek into a mask; below it a second pale stripe runs along the throat like a whisker. The upperparts are warm brown and heavily streaked, the breast orange-buff, fading onto the belly. The second feature is on the tail: a white patch on each side of the tail base, most obvious in flight. The spring male is the sharpest version — near-black cheek, brilliant white stripe, a white wing patch — but the female, the juvenile and the drab autumn bird all show the supercilium and the white tail base too. See those two marks and the bird is named.

Confusion species

Stonechat is the only real confusion — see also the Stonechat species page. It shows no supercilium in any plumage: the male's head is wholly black, the female's plain dark brown, so the face reads as closed rather than striped. Its tail is uniformly dark with no white corners, its back is less crisply streaked, and its outline is rounder, shorter-winged and longer-tailed. Habitat helps too: Whinchat sits in herb-rich, damp grassland and along ditch banks, Stonechat on dry heath, dune and verge. And the calendar settles most of it: between November and March a chat in Europe cannot be a Whinchat, because by then it is in the Sahel. Siberian Stonechat, the autumn vagrant, may show a pale supercilium but lacks the white tail base and instead has a large unstreaked creamy rump. Northern Wheatear is bigger and longer-legged, stands on the ground rather than on stems, and shows a broad white rump with a black inverted T in the tail.

Habitat

Open, herb-rich grassland with plenty of structure that is not mown too early: extensive hay meadows, damp and wet grassland with soft rush and sorrel, rough ditch banks and trenches, the edges of raised bog and wet heath, and in the mountains flowery meadows well above the treeline. The constant requirement is a combination of tall, stiff stems to hunt from, a dense grass sward to hide the nest in, and plenty of insects. On passage it uses anything that stands proud: potato haulm, sunflowers, maize edges, fence posts and thistle heads.

Range and movements

Breeds from the British Isles and north-west Iberia east beyond the Ob and from northern Scandinavia south to central Iberia, the central Italian peninsula and the Caucasus; every bird winters in sub-Saharan Africa, from West Africa east to East Africa and south to south-central Africa. On the island of Great Britain it is now essentially an upland bird — Wales, the Pennines, the Southern Uplands and the Scottish glens — having withdrawn almost entirely from the lowland south and east. In Iberia it breeds only in the northern third — from the eastern Pyrenees through the Cantabrian range and the Galician mountains into the far north-west of the peninsula, and south to the sierras of Madrid and Ávila — in hay meadows and mountain pasture, in increasingly fragmented pockets. As a passage migrant, by contrast, it can still be seen everywhere, from mid-August to early October, on field margins and rough ground throughout the region.

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

How and when to look

On the breeding grounds the male sits still and upright and the white supercilium identifies it at once. For migrants September is far easier: walk along a potato field, a sunflower field or a rough field margin and watch every small bird sitting on top of the crop. Flush it and look at the tail base — two white patches and you are done.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but one of the hardest-hit farmland birds of western Europe. The causes are well documented and all point to the grassland: hay meadows have been converted into heavily fertilised, species-poor production grassland, water tables have been lowered, and mowing is earlier and more frequent, so that nests and young disappear under the mower in June. Add to this the loss of rough ditch banks, trenches and odd corners — the lookout posts the bird depends on — and the decline of large insects. Where wet, late-mown, herb-rich grassland has been restored it returns, but only in small numbers and only where the management is kept up year after year.

Scientific name

Saxicola rubetra | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Motacilla rubetra; 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. rubetra is a Latin name for a small bird. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.