Buntings are the ‘other’ seed-eating songbirds. Unlike garden-visiting finches and sparrows, buntings tend to keep their distance in more ‘wild’ habitats, such as farmland, marshes and mountaintops.
They differ from finches by lacking grooves on the inside of the conical bill; buntings have a bony hump in the roof of the mouth instead, which helps to crush seeds. The cutting edges of their mandibles also curve slightly inwards.
Buntings have a broader diet than finches, eating many more insects. They usually nest on or very near the ground, and the young often leave the nest before they are able to fly properly.
1 SNOW BUNTING
Plectrophenax nivalis Uncommon and localised; 60 breeding pairs, up to 11,250 in winter.
Amber List of Conservation Concern.
Haul yourself up Ben Nevis and you might set eyes on one of Britain’s special birds. We should be proud to have a tiny breeding population on our Scottish mountains, because the snow bunting is arguably the world’s toughest small bird, used to the company of polar bears. It breeds further north than any other small bird in the world, well into the permanent ice.
It has thick plumage and often crouches slightly when it walks, so its feathers cover part of the legs, an adaptation to prevent heat loss.
2 YELLOWHAMMER
Emberiza citrinella
Common all year round; 680,000 breeding pairs.
Red List of Conservation Concern (declining).
The yellowhammer is easy to identify. There is always some yellow on the plumage, especially around the head, and although the males are the brightest coloured, females also look yellow, albeit streakier.
The males adorn the tops of hedgerows throughout the country in summer, singing a famous ditty that is usually rendered “a little bit of bread and no cheeeese”. The “cheese” section, which is sometimes missed out, sounds rather like the bird is breathing out heavily.
3 REED BUNTING
Emberiza schoeniclus Common all year round; 255,000 pairs.
Amber List of Conservation Concern.
Almost everybody seems to dismiss the reed bunting as a sparrow-like bird, but it’s much smarter and streakier, and has an ever-twitching tail, which is white along the edges. The reed bunting’s call is a series of short, somewhat hesitant phrases of no great quality, something like “tsick, twissle, tissick…”. Somebody has delightfully described it “as a young child counting to three and then forgetting what comes next”.
