Eastern Yellow Wagtail | Motacilla tschutschensis

Voice

The call is a loud, rasping, hoarse dzreep with much noise, clearly harsher than the musical psree of most Western Yellow Wagtails and very similar to the call of Citrine Wagtail. The song is a simple series of similar notes.

Identification

15–16 cm, virtually the same size as Western Yellow Wagtail, with black legs and the same short tail. Breeding males closely resemble certain forms of Western Yellow Wagtail: grey head with a white supercilium (tschutschensis, plexa) or green head with a yellow supercilium (taivana). Almost all vagrants are first-winter birds: cold grey-brown above without olive, white to off-white below with a clean white throat and at most a yellowish wash on the undertail, two pale wingbars, a plain head pattern with a pale supercilium and dark ear coverts, and often a fine necklace. The hind claw is long and only slightly curved.

Confusion species

Western Yellow Wagtail (Motacilla flava) is the real problem: young birds keep an olive or brown tinge on the back or rump, are yellowish-buff below and give a full, musical psree. Young Citrine Wagtails (Motacilla citreola) are also grey and white, but have broader white wingbars, a pale forehead and a pale surround to the ear coverts. Because feldegg, which breeds in the Levant and Iraq, has a similarly harsh call, the call alone is not enough in this region; a firm identification needs photographs, sound recordings and preferably DNA.

Habitat

As a vagrant to be expected in the same places as Western Yellow Wagtails: grassland, irrigated fields, golf courses, sewage works and the wet edges of pools, often among flocks of Western Yellow Wagtails. It breeds in tundra, marshy forest edges and wet steppe.

Range and movements

In the region a vagrant with hardly any accepted records; the chance is greatest in the Gulf states and Oman, where other East Asian vagrants regularly turn up, and among the large flocks of Western Yellow Wagtails in Israel and Egypt. Because the species has only recently been split and young birds closely resemble Western Yellow Wagtails, it is probably overlooked. Beyond the region it breeds from northern Siberia and Kazakhstan to Mongolia, north-eastern China, the Russian Far East and Alaska, and winters in South-East Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines and northern Australia; in western Europe it is recorded annually in late autumn.

How and when to look

From October to December, listen among flocks of wagtails on irrigated fields and golf courses in the Emirates or Oman for a strikingly harsh, rasping call from a grey-and-white young bird, and record it: without sound recordings and photographs a sighting will not be accepted.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened. In the region a vagrant from Siberia with no or only a few confirmed records; every sighting deserves documentation and submission to the national rarities committee.

Scientific name

Motacilla tschutschensis | Gmelin, 1789

Gmelin described the species in 1789 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Motacilla was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Motacilla was the Roman name for the wagtail; it is really a diminutive of motare 'to move about', but from medieval times -cilla was wrongly taken to mean 'tail'. tschutschensis refers to the Chukchi Peninsula in the far east of Russia, the locality of the birds first described. The specimen the first description was based on came from the coast of the Chukchi Peninsula.