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Wood warbler | Phylloscopus sibilatrix
Fluiter | Mosquitero silbador
The wood warbler is the largest of our leaf warblers, and the only one tied entirely to mature closed broadleaved woodland. In mid-May its accelerating trill can be heard under the beeches.
Voice
Wood warbler has two entirely separate song types and mixes them freely. The first opens with a few loose ticking notes that follow each other faster and faster until they fuse into a shivering trill: sip … sip … sip-sip-sip-sip-sipsipsip-srrrrrrrrrr. It sounds exactly like a coin set spinning on a marble table top — separate taps at first, then a whirring rush that dies away. The whole phrase takes three to four seconds and is often delivered in a short display flight, wings quivering, from branch to branch. The second type stands apart: a series of four to eight identical, plaintive, drawn-out whistles, peeu … peeu … peeu … peeu, each sounding a little sadder than the last, with half a second of silence between them. The call is a soft, rather flat weet, and an alarmed bird gives a hard tik. Song runs from the last days of April into early July, peaks in the first two weeks of May, and continues all day, including the midday hours when the rest of the wood falls silent.
Recording: Benoît Van Hecke — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Large and elongated for a leaf warbler, with a short tail and very long wings: the primary projection about equals the length of the tertials and the wingtip falls well down the tail. The plumage is built in three bands that show at a distance: bright yellow-green above, vivid yellow on supercilium, throat and upper breast, and below that an abrupt snow white. The supercilium is long, broad and lemon, with a dark eye-stripe beneath it. Coverts and tertials are fringed green-yellow, giving the wing a warm glow; the legs are pale flesh to yellow-brown. Sexes alike.
Confusion species
Willow warbler is smaller and far less contrasting: its yellow bleeds diffusely onto the flanks, while wood warbler shows a sharp border between yellow breast and white belly, and wood warbler has a longer primary projection and a shorter tail. Chiffchaff is compact, dark-legged and has no yellow throat. Western Bonelli's warbler, in the Pyrenees and northern Spain, is grey-green with no yellow on throat or breast, has a yellow rump and a yellow-green wing panel, and a completely different rattling song. Yellow-browed warbler is much smaller and shows two clear wing bars.
Habitat
Mature, tall, closed broadleaved woodland with an open, almost bare floor: beech woods on slopes, old oak woods and beech-oak stands on poor sandy soils. The absence of a dense shrub layer is essential, because the bird sings and feeds in the free space between canopy and ground and builds its domed nest in the leaf litter. Slope woodland and stands of old, smooth-barked beech are preferred; young plantations and thickly overgrown edges are avoided.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds from northern Spain and the Pyrenees to the Urals, throughout central, northern and eastern Europe, and winters in the humid forests of equatorial Africa. In north-west Europe it is a scarce breeder of old beech woods on sandy soils and in hill country, much reduced over recent decades. Around the Mediterranean it breeds only in northern Iberia, in the beech woods of Navarre, the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains, and is otherwise chiefly a passage migrant filtering through the south in small numbers in August and September, from Iberia to Turkey and North Africa.
- Breeding (summer)
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Mid-May, in an old beech wood with a bare floor, preferably on a slope; walk slowly and stop the moment you hear the first trill. Unlike most songbirds, this one does not require a dawn start: the wood warbler sings deep into the morning and even through the middle of the day. Look for the bird between eye level and about ten metres up, on a horizontal side branch, and listen for the plaintive peeu, which often comes from a different bird further off and so betrays a second territory. Old beech compartments on the sandy soils and slope woods in the hill country of north-west Europe, and in the south the beech woods of Navarre and Irati, are the best places.
Conservation status
Globally not threatened, but the European trend is clearly negative and the decline in north-west Europe is steep; in the Netherlands the species is red-listed. A thickening shrub layer driven by nitrogen deposition, the loss of old layered broadleaved woodland, drying soils and changes in the African wintering grounds are seen as the main causes. Strong year-to-year swings tied to caterpillar abundance are normal for the species.
Scientific name
Phylloscopus sibilatrix | (Bechstein, 1792) (GBIF: Phylloscopus sibillatrix)
Bechstein described the species in 1792 as Motacilla sibilatrix; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Phylloscopus was introduced in 1826 by Boie. Phylloscopus is Greek, from phullon 'leaf' and skopos 'seeker', from skopeō 'to watch': the bird that searches the foliage. sibilatrix is Latin for 'female whistler', from sibilare 'to whistle', after the trilling song of the male. The specimen the first description was based on came from the mountains of Thuringia.