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Cirl Bunting | Emberiza cirlus
Cirlgors | Escribano soteño
The bunting of the green, wooded slopes of the Maghreb: a Yellowhammer-like bird whose male wears a black throat and black eyestripe. In the region it is a resident of the Rif, the Atlas and the Tell mountains, and otherwise almost absent.
Voice
The song is a dry, fast rattle on one pitch, tsrrrrrrrr, without Yellowhammer's drawn-out final note; often from a treetop, a telephone wire or a cypress. Call: a thin, sharp sip or zit, often repeated.
Recording: András Schmidt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
A medium-sized, rather compact bunting with a shorter tail than Yellowhammer and white outer tail feathers. The male has a yellow face with a black eyestripe, a black bib and an olive-grey, finely black-streaked crown; below the bib a yellow band, then an olive-green breast band, and chestnut-spotted flanks. Females and young birds are dull yellow-brown and finely streaked, with a dark border to the cheek. The deciding feature in every plumage is the olive-grey to grey-brown rump.
Confusion species
Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella), a rare winter visitor in North Africa, has a warm chestnut rump and the male lacks the black throat and eyestripe; female Yellowhammers are more coarsely streaked and yellower on belly and undertail coverts. Rock Bunting (Emberiza cia), which shares the same slopes, has a grey head with bold black stripes and an unstreaked orange-brown belly. House Bunting (Emberiza sahari) is smaller, rufous without any yellow, and favours villages and rocks.
Habitat
Open, mixed landscape on low and middle mountain slopes: maquis and open holm and cork oak woodland, woodland edges, olive groves, orchards and small fields with hedges, also cedar and juniper woodland in the Atlas. In winter in small parties on stubble and fallow close to cover.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the habitats of North Africa and the Middle East.
Range and movements
Morocco: widespread in the north and in the mountains — Tingitana, Rif, Middle and High Atlas, the Central Plateau and locally the Anti-Atlas — absent from the Saharan regions. Algeria: the Tell mountains, Kabylie and the Aurès, to the edge of the high plateaus. Tunisia: the north, Kroumirie and the Dorsale, scarcer further south. In Libya only a single report from the north-west; in Egypt and the Levant practically absent (the nearest breeding birds are on Cyprus and in western and southern Turkey). Beyond the region resident in southern and western Europe, from Iberia to the Balkans, with an isolated population in south-west England.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In spring drive through the lower Middle Atlas or the Rif (for example around Ifrane or Chefchaouen) and listen at olive groves and woodland edges for the flat rattle from a treetop. In Tunisia the Kroumirie around Aïn Draham is a good area. When winter parties flush, check for the grey rump.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern). Locally common in suitable hill country in the Maghreb; declines mainly where hedges and old groves disappear through intensification, overgrazing and wood cutting.
Scientific name
Emberiza cirlus | Linnaeus, 1766
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Emberiza was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Emberiza comes from Old German Embritz, a name for a bunting. cirlus comes from the local Italian name cirlo for a bunting, from zirlare, 'to chirp'. The specimen the first description was based on came from southern Europe.