The Common Whitethroat (Curruca communis) is a slim, restless warbler of scrubby, open country, its bright white throat often puffed out during song. The male has a grey head, a rust-brown wash across the back and wings, and a soft pinkish-beige underside, while the female is browner and more subdued overall. Both sexes show pale-edged wing feathers forming a light wing patch, a fairly long tail with white outer feathers, and, in older birds, red eyes. Measuring 13-15 cm, it is a lively bird that rarely sits still, constantly moving through dense bushes.
Its song is short, hurried and scratchy, often rendered as "wed-wed-wittt-tjerr", repeated tirelessly through the breeding season, and is most often delivered from a distinctive song flight: the male rises from a thorny bush on whirring wings, sings while hovering a few metres up, then drops back into cover. The alarm call is a hard, smacking "tack-tack". Common Whitethroats arrive in Sweden from late April into May and breed across the southern and central parts of the country and well into Norrland, with a population running into several hundred thousand pairs and increasing. The nest, a loose cup of grass and root fibres, is built low in dense, often thorny cover, rose, blackthorn or bramble, which gave the species its Swedish name, "thorn warbler". The 4-5 eggs are incubated for 11-13 days by both parents, and the young leave the nest after just 10-12 days, sometimes before they can properly fly. Diet shifts from insects, larvae and spiders in summer to berries and fruit before the long migration to winter quarters in the African savanna south of the Sahara.
Read about this species in Swedish →