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European Serin | Serinus serinus
Europese kanarie | Verdecillo
A small, busy yellow finch with a stubby bill, filling the gardens, orchards and olive groves of the Maghreb with its jingling song. In the Middle East it is mainly a winter visitor, which also breeds locally in the Levant.
Voice
The song is a fast, high, glassy, jingling rattle, like shaken shards of glass, sung from a wire or treetop or in a bat-like song flight with slow wingbeats. The call is a quick, rolling tirrilit and in flight a soft tsoo.
Recording: Beatrix Saadi-Varchmin — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
Small and compact, with a strikingly short, thick bill and a forked tail. The male has a lemon-yellow forehead, supercilium, throat and breast, a streaked greenish-brown back, heavily streaked flanks and a bright yellow rump that flashes in flight. The female is duller and more streaked, with less yellow; juveniles are brown and streaked throughout but already show the pale rump. No yellow in the tail.
Confusion species
Syrian Serin (Serinus syriacus) is paler and longer-tailed, barely streaked, with yellow mainly on the face and yellow edges in wing and tail. Red-fronted Serin (Serinus pusillus) has a blackish head with a red forehead patch. Eurasian Siskin (Spinus spinus) has a more pointed bill, yellow wing-bars and yellow tail sides; European Greenfinch (Chloris chloris) is much larger with yellow wing edges.
Habitat
Semi-open country with trees: orchards, olive and citrus groves, gardens, parks, cemeteries, village edges and open conifer and oak woodland up to the cedar zone of the Atlas. In winter in small flocks on rough ground, field margins and in oases.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the habitats of North Africa and the Middle East.
Range and movements
A common breeder in northern and central Morocco, northern Algeria and northern Tunisia, with some wandering in winter, also to north-west Libya. In the east it breeds in Lebanon, western Syria and northern and central Israel; in winter birds from Turkey and Europe arrive and it is more widespread, also in Jordan and scarce in the Nile Delta and northern Egypt. In Iraq and on the Arabian Peninsula very rare. Beyond the region in central and southern Europe and Turkey.
- 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 the species stands out by its song: the jingling rattle sounds from every Moroccan town garden or olive grove. In the Levant it pays to check winter flocks carefully for Syrian Serin.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened. Common in the Maghreb; in Israel mainly a winter visitor and a local breeder with a slightly declining trend. This species too is trapped as a cage bird in North Africa.
Scientific name
Serinus serinus | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Fringilla Serinus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Serinus was introduced in 1816 by Koch. Serinus is Neo-Latin for 'canary-yellow'. The specific name repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from Switzerland.