Reed Bunting | Emberiza schoeniclus

Voice

The call is more useful than the song: a descending, plaintive tsiuu, and when alarmed a sharp tsik; in winter these calls are almost all you hear. The song, only occasionally heard here in March, is short and halting: tsee… tsee… tsee-tississi.

Identification

13.5–15.5 cm, a slender bunting with a fairly long, notched tail and white on the two outer tail feathers. In winter, when it is here, the black of the male’s head is largely hidden under brown feather fringes, leaving a shadowy mask with a pale collar and a pale moustachial stripe; in March the black reappears through wear. Females and young birds are brown and streaked, with a creamy supercilium, a pale submoustachial stripe and below it a dark malar stripe that widens towards the neck. The lesser coverts are rufous, the rump grey-brown and the belly white with streaked flanks. Eastern forms wintering in Iraq and the Levant have a strikingly thick, bulbous bill and are paler.

Confusion species

Little Bunting (Emberiza pusilla) is smaller, with a rufous cheek framed in black, a straight, pointed bill and a hard tik call. Rustic Bunting (Emberiza rustica) has a rufous breast band, rufous flank streaks and a rufous rump. Female Black-headed Bunting (Emberiza melanocephala) is larger, unstreaked yellowish below and has no white in the tail.

Habitat

Reedbeds, bulrush marshes, rank margins of rivers, canals and lakes, wet fields and the edges of rice and other irrigated fields. It often roosts in small groups in reeds and by day forages on the ground or on the heads of reeds and grasses, mainly for seeds.

Range and movements

Winter visitor to the wetlands of northern Morocco, northern Algeria and Tunisia, scarce along the coast of Libya, more numerous in the Nile Delta and Nile Valley in Egypt, in Israel (Hula Valley, coastal plain), Lebanon, Syria and above all in the marshes and irrigated areas of Iraq; also in Kuwait and scarce on the east coast of Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Rare in southern Arabia. Beyond the region it breeds across almost all of Europe and much of Asia.

• 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 winter in the reed fringes of the Hula Valley, the merjas of north-western Morocco or the marshes near Basra. Listen at the edge of the reeds for the plaintive tsiuu; in the evening small groups drop in to roost. In Iraq and the Levant look at the bill: thick-billed birds from the east look very different from the slender western birds.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened. In the region, the number of wintering birds depends on the state of the marshes: the draining of the Iraqi marshes in the 1990s and the loss of wetlands elsewhere in the region greatly reduced its wintering sites; since the partial restoration of the Iraqi marshes the species is common there again.

Scientific name

Emberiza schoeniclus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Fringilla schoeniclus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Emberiza was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Emberiza comes from Old German Embritz, a name for a bunting. schoeniclus is from Ancient Greek skhoiniklos, a name used by classical authors for a bird that can no longer be identified with certainty. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.