The Ortolan Bunting (Emberiza hortulana) is the melancholic bunting of the farmed landscape, with a greyish-green head, a yellow throat and a distinctive pink bill. It measures about 15–17 cm, has a wingspan of 23–29 cm and weighs 19–28 grams. The male shows a uniform olive-grey head and breast, a bright yellow throat and moustache stripe, and warm, unstreaked reddish-brown underparts, with a clear pale eye-ring and pink bill among its best field marks; the female is more subdued, with weaker yellow tones and a faintly streaked breast, but shares the same basic pattern. The bird's scientific name, hortulana, derives from the Latin hortulus, roughly "the little garden bird".
Its song, the species' hallmark, is a short series of clear, gently falling notes, usually rendered "tju-tju-tju-dii-dii", the opening notes held level before the closing ones drop in pitch, typically delivered from an exposed perch over open ground. The Ortolan Bunting now breeds only sporadically in northern and central Sweden, chiefly in the Norrland inland, on clearcuts, pine heaths and open farmland, arriving in May and departing in August for wintering grounds south of the Sahara. Its Swedish population has collapsed dramatically, from around 50,000 pairs down to only a few thousand today, and the species is red-listed as Critically Endangered. The nest is built on the ground, a simple cup well hidden in low vegetation, often at a field edge or on a clearcut; the female lays 4–5 eggs and does most of the incubating, while both parents feed the young mainly on insects, allowing usually only a single brood in the short breeding season. Outside the breeding season the diet shifts largely to seeds from grasses and herbs, and the loss of insect-rich clearcut and farmland habitat is considered one of several causes behind the species' steep decline.
Read about this species in Swedish →