The Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) is Europe's smallest bird, just 8–9 cm long and weighing a mere 5–7 grams. It is olive-green above and dull whitish-grey below, with a black-and-white patterned wing, while the crown carries a bright yellow band edged in black — orange at the centre in the male. The large dark eye sits in a plain, pale face with no eyebrow stripe at all, and the body is round and compact with a very fine bill.
The song is a series of extremely high-pitched, thin notes repeated as "si-si-si" and finished with a small trill, pitched close to 8 kHz — high enough that many older listeners struggle to hear it at all; the call is a thin, fine "sii". The Goldcrest breeds throughout Sweden except on the open mountain tundra, tightly bound to coniferous forest, and the population is huge, in the order of 1–2 million pairs, though it fluctuates sharply because hard winters can hit resident northern birds hard; northern and eastern populations are partly migratory. The nest is a small, thick-walled, almost spherical structure of moss and spiderweb, lined with feathers and hung beneath a spruce branch, well hidden among the needles; the female lays a large clutch of 8–12 eggs and can manage two broods in a good season. Goldcrests feed restlessly on tiny insects, spiders and their eggs among the outer twigs of spruce crowns, often hanging upside down to reach prey on the underside of the needles, and in autumn and winter they commonly join roving flocks of tits.
Read about this species in Swedish →