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Little Bunting | Emberiza pusilla
Dwerggors | Escribano pigmeo
The Little Bunting is a small Siberian bunting that turns up in the region as a rare passage migrant and winter visitor, mainly in the Gulf States, Oman, Kuwait and Israel. Anyone who finds one usually finds it among pipits and sparrows in an oasis, a field edge or a date-palm grove.
Voice
The call does the work: a short, hard, dry tik, like two pebbles knocked together, sharper and shorter than anything a Reed Bunting gives. Song is not to be expected in the region.
Recording: Peter Zeller — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
12–13.5 cm, a small, compact bunting with a fairly short tail and white on the outer tail feathers. The head pattern is decisive: a rufous crown stripe between two black bands, a rufous cheek framed in black behind and below, a narrow creamy eye-ring and a pale spot just in front of the eye. The underparts are white with sharp black streaks on the breast and flanks, the legs flesh-coloured and the upper mandible strikingly straight rather than convex, so that the bill looks pointed. The sexes are almost identical, and first-year birds already show the rufous face.
Confusion species
Females and winter-plumaged Reed Buntings (Emberiza schoeniclus) are larger, with a browner cheek lacking a complete black frame, a more convex bill, rufous lesser coverts and a plaintive tsiuu call. Rustic Bunting (Emberiza rustica) has a rufous breast band, rufous flank streaks and a peaked crown. Black-faced Bunting (Emberiza spodocephala) lacks the rufous cheek and has an olive-grey head.
Habitat
On passage and in winter in fields and weedy field edges, irrigated areas, oases, date-palm groves, parks, golf courses and rank scrub near water. It forages on the ground, often unobtrusively under bushes or among crops, sometimes with pipits and sparrows.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the habitats of North Africa and the Middle East.
Range and movements
A rare to scarce passage migrant and winter visitor in the east of the region: annual in small numbers in the United Arab Emirates and Oman, rare in Kuwait (especially Al-Abraq oasis), Bahrain, Qatar and eastern Saudi Arabia. In Israel a very rare migrant, less than once a year, mainly from mid-October to mid-December in the date plantations of the Arava; until the late 1980s regular in November at Eilot. Elsewhere in the region, including North Africa, an exceptional vagrant. It breeds in the taiga and forest-tundra from northern Scandinavia to eastern Siberia and winters mainly from north-eastern India to southern China and South-East Asia.
How and when to look
The best chance is in November and December in the fields and parks of the Emirates and Oman, and in Kuwait at Al-Abraq oasis. Among pipits, listen for a hard tik and look for a small bunting with a rufous face that darts into a bush when flushed.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, with a large breeding range. In the region only a few birds are involved, at the western edge of the wintering range; most records date from the 1990s onwards, partly reflecting the larger number of birdwatchers in the Gulf States.
Scientific name
Emberiza pusilla | Pallas, 1776
Pallas described the species in 1776 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. pusilla is Latin for 'very small'. The specimen the first description was based on came from the Daurian Range, Siberia.