The Whinchat (Saxicola rubetra) is a small, compact songbird of open meadows, easily spotted perched bolt upright on a fence post, stem or bush top before making short sallies after insects. The male in summer plumage has brown-spotted upperparts, a warm orange-brown breast and a very conspicuous white eyebrow stripe running back above a dark cheek patch, with a white patch on the wing; the female is paler and more subtly marked but shares the same basic pattern, including the pale eyebrow stripe. It measures 12–14 cm, has a wingspan of 21–24 cm and weighs 14–24 g.
Its most frequent call is a hard, smacking "tsäk-tsäk," like two stones knocked together, often combined with a thin whistle, while the song is a short, slightly crackling and repetitive strophe often mixed with skilled mimicry of other birds. The Whinchat breeds throughout Sweden on open ground — meadows, pastures, shoreline meadows, ditch edges, clearcuts and sparsely vegetated mires — nesting on the ground, well hidden in a grass tussock beside a bush or post, where the female lays 5–6 eggs; the species is also a fairly regular host to the Cuckoo. It feeds on insects, larvae, spiders and other small invertebrates, typically watching from a raised perch before dropping onto prey. A long-distance migrant, it arrives in May and leaves in August–September to winter mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The Swedish population, estimated at 300,000–500,000 pairs, is declining — now classified as Near Threatened — chiefly because of the loss of species-rich meadow and pasture land to increasingly intensive farming.
Read about this species in Swedish →