Seeking The Cirl Bunting
Emberiza Cirlus, the Cirl Bunting is a charming relative of the yellowhammer and Devon and Cornwall represent the limit of its European range. A lowland farmland bird, it has very specific requirements for habitat and climate, and agricultural changes have resulted in a severe population decline in the UK, making it a Red List species.
Confined to south-west England they are best looked for in fields and hedges of south Devon, near to the coast. With luck, they can be seen all year round, eating insects and seeds.
In previous decades the bird was to be found across the whole of southern England, but numbers declined massively in the second half of the 20th century, with just over 100 pairs existing in 1989.
The good news is that a joint campaign by the RSPB and Natural England has helped farmers in the south-west to manage their land to provide suitable year-round food supplies and breeding habitat. By 2009, the scheme had produced nearly 900 breeding pairs.
Advisers from the Cirl Bunting Species Recovery Programme visit farmers to recommend the best agri-environment scheme options to encourage the bird’s return. These include the following:
- Grasslands provide invertebrates for summer food - grasshoppers are especially important food for chicks.
- Weedy over-winter stubble provides essential winter food as do seeds from set-aside and weedy field margins.
- Tall, thick hedgerows and scrub provide nesting. Hedges should be thick and between two and four metres tall. Cirl buntings’ favoured nesting sites are hedges that include blackthorn, hawthorn and other native species, and patches of dense scrub (gorse and bramble).
It’s down to the work that farmers on the Devon coast have put in on their land that this comeback has been possible.
Farmland birds as a group have declined by 50% in the past 40 years. If the decline in a dangerously threatened species like this one can be halted then there is hope for all the endangered birds in our countryside.
What do these birds look like?
Both sexes have olive-green rumps (contrasting with the chestnut rump of the yellowhammer). They can be elusive but males can be located when they sing - a brief, rapid, rattling trill.
Cirl buntings pair up during the spring and summer when they will raise two to three broods between April and September. They occur in small flocks during winter, sometimes with other seed-eating buntings and finches.
More information can be found on the RSPB website: