Cirl Bunting

The cirl bunting is like a small yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella), and is around 15.5 cm (6.1 in) in length with a wing-span 22–25.5 cm (8.7–10.0 in). It has a thick seed-eater's bill. The male has a bright yellow head, with a black crown, eyestripe and throat, and a greenish breast band across its otherwise yellow underparts, and a heavily streaked brown back. The female is much more like the yellowhammer, but has a streaked grey-brown rump and chestnut shoulders. The monotonous song of the male is a rattling trill, like the Arctic warbler or the terminal rattle of the lesser whitethroat.

The ideal farmland habitat is a mixture of grass and arable fields, divided by thick hedgerows with pockets of dense scrub. They can tolerate a certain degree of urbanisation, and are found in green spaces in towns and cities, even Rome. They are sedentary in nature and will often travel only 250 metres (820 ft) from their nests to forage in summer, and up to 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) in winter to find stubble.

In the summer their natural food consists of invertebrates for example grasshoppers and crickets to feed their chicks. In the winter they feed on small seeds from over-wintered stubbles, fallow land, set-aside, and the over-winter feeding of stock with grain or hay. They tend to feed in flocks during the winter.

A very small cirl bunting population exists in South Devon in England, near the small town of Kingsbridge where the pioneering ornithologist George Montagu discovered the species, as he recorded in his book, the Ornithological Dictionary, 1802. The species appears to have first colonised Britain near Kingsbridge, most likely not long before Montagu described it. It expanded from there across southern England in the nineteenth century. It retreated from the 1930s onwards, so that by 1989 the population again survived mainly near Kingsbridge. Since then, conservation efforts have increased the population more than fivefold, but it remains almost wholly in Devon.