Chaffinch
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Chaffinch ( Fringilla coelebs ), male |
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| Linnaeus , 1758 |
The chaffinch ( Fringilla coelebs ) is a songbird belonging to the finch family (Fringillidae) . It occurs all over Europe with the exception of Iceland and northernmost Scandinavia, its distribution area extends in an easterly direction to central Siberia. It is also a breeding bird in North Africa and the Middle East up to and including Iran. The chaffinch was introduced by humans in New Zealand and the South African Republic.
In Central Europe , the chaffinch is one of the most widespread breeding birds. Its distribution area extends from the coast to the tree line in the mountains. The chaffinches of Northern and Eastern Europe are migratory birds, whereas in Central Europe it is a partial migrant. Several subspecies are distinguished. Of these, three are found in the Canary Islands and one each in the Azores, Madeira, Sardinia and Crete.
Appearance
The chaffinch reaches a body length of 14 to 18 centimeters. The individuals of the nominate form weigh between 18 and 25 grams. Regardless of gender, chaffinches have a distinctive white shoulder patch, white wing band and white outer tail feathers. Otherwise there is a noticeable sexual dimorphism .
In the males, the underside of the body and the sides of the head are brownish-pink to red-brown. The top of the head, the nape and the sides of the neck are conspicuously gray-blue in the summer half-year, and more brownish-gray in the winter half-year. The forehead is black, the back is maroon and the rump is greenish. The male's beak is steel blue in spring, otherwise horn-colored. The females are olive-gray on the top of the body and a little lighter on the underside of the body. The female's beak is light brown to horn-colored all year round.
Newly hatched chaffinches initially have pale, smoke-gray downs on the upper side of the body, wings, thighs and belly. The skin is flesh-colored pink. The throat is deep pink, the beak ridges are white or creamy to yellowish in color. Fledglings are similar to adult females, but the feathers on their heads and bodies are a little shorter and softer, the control feathers are narrower and taper off.
Chaffinches walk on the ground, nodding their heads rhythmically. The flight is wavelike.
Male chaffinch with a brownish-pink chest, black forehead and downs on the back
Male chaffinch in summer dress with a gray head, black forehead, steel-blue beak and red-brown head
Male chaffinch with spread black and white cover feathers and greenish rump
distribution and habitat
The chaffinch is widespread in Europe and North Africa, but also in West Asia, where it lives mainly in forests, but also in parks and large gardens up to an altitude of about 1,500 meters. It is one of the most common songbird species in Europe.
The habitat of the chaffinch are forests, thickets, hedges, gardens and large fruit-growing areas. In Africa, it is in forests of cork oaks, cedars, most commonly Aleppo pine , Thuja, eucalyptus, walnut, Sandarak- and Arganbeständen be found as well as in olive groves. In the Cyrenaica it is particularly common in juniper forests.
Chaffinches are part migrants in Central Europe, while migratory birds in Eastern and Northern Europe. A large part of the population remains in the breeding area all year round. Chaffinches, which migrate to climatically more favorable regions during the winter months, migrate both during the day and at night. They partly follow the coastline, river valleys or mountain passes. In Morocco, the birds migrating from Europe can be observed especially from late August to November. At the Strait of Gibraltar, retreating European chaffinches can be seen as early as January and the migration continues into April. A bird that was originally ringed in Kaliningrad, 3,250 kilometers away, has already been found in Morocco . In Algeria, birds from Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy are among the recoveries.
In Africa, the migratory birds that overwinter there as well as the resident birds that breed there form small flocks that often consist of only one sex. They are regularly associated with greenlings , bloodlines and goldfinches . Together with these, they form larger groups that look for food in fields or use resting places.
In Germany, the chaffinch was considered the most common breeding bird species with nine to eleven million breeding pairs in 2008.
nutrition
The diet of the chaffinch consists of berries , seeds of all kinds, insects and spiders . The nestlings are fed with insects and their larvae.
The chaffinch looks for its food mainly on the ground and mainly uses the places that are only sparsely covered with vegetation. The food is taken from the ground with quick, pecking movements.
voice
The chaffinch's contact and alarm call is a loud “pink, pink”, its flight call is a muffled “yup, yup”. From March onwards he sings loudly and piercingly like “zizizizjazjazoritiu-zip” or zipzipzip . Different calls, so-called regional dialects, can be heard in different living spaces. In addition to the name-giving call "pink" (or "fink"), there is also the "dreary" (or "cloudy"), which in some areas is regarded as heralding rain. This “rain call” can sometimes be pronounced with two syllables. According to other sources, this call is only referred to as "rain call" because it is onomatopoeic interpreted as "dripping". During disputes and turf wars, a loud click can be heard, which apparently serves as a threatening sound. At the same time, as with some other songbirds (e.g. male carrion crows), the fletching of the head (vertex) is set up.
The singing of male chaffinches (also called finch slap ) is evaluated in competitions in the centuries-old tradition and finch maneuvers in the Harz Mountains, which have been recognized as intangible cultural heritage since 2014 . At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, these competitions were also very popular in other areas. In Vienna the catchers and keepers were called Vogelbucker , the competitions here were mostly held in restaurants .
Reproduction
The chaffinch prefers to breed in light deciduous and mixed forests as well as in hedges, parks and gardens. In Central Europe, the breeding season begins at the end of March at the earliest, but chaffinches usually brood from mid-April to June. In Morocco and Algeria, chaffinches breed from late March to early June. In the southwest of the Cape Province, however, from September to November. Depending on the climate and location, they raise one to two annual broods per year.
At the beginning of the breeding season, the male marks his breeding ground with loud singing. The size of the breeding area varies considerably depending on the distribution area and is larger in Europe the higher in the north the chaffinch breeds. In the Moroccan maquis , the breeding grounds have an average size of 270 square meters. The breeding ground is vigorously defended by both birds in a pair, intruders are chased away.
The thick-walled nest , carefully built exclusively by the female, consists of roots , bark fibers , stalks , mosses and lichens . Inside it is padded with hair and individual feathers . The nest is usually built at a height of two to ten meters on bushes or in trees in a fork of a branch and is well camouflaged by the mosses and lichens.
The clutch usually consists of four to six light brown or bluish-white eggs , which are marked by red to dark brown spots and fine stripes. The drawing is occasionally so dense that the basic color is covered. Only very rarely are they drawn weakly or not at all. The incubation period is thirteen to fourteen days, it is only the female who breeds, which usually begins after the penultimate egg has been laid. After hatching, the young are fed by both adult birds, but the female has a larger share in the care of the young birds. The nestling period is usually 11 to 18 days, but the young birds usually fly out after 14 days. Occasionally the young birds form a family group together with the parent birds for a further 20 to 35 days. Young birds are able to look after themselves about 14 days after they have fled.
The oldest ringed bird that has been found so far reached an age of 14 years. As a rule, chaffinches rarely live to be more than five years old. Nestling mortality is particularly high in the years when there is a shortage of caterpillars.
Subspecies
So far 19 subspecies are recognized:
- Fringilla coelebs coelebs Linnaeus , 1758 is the nominate form that occurs from continental Europe to Siberia and partly overwinters in northwest Africa. The coat of the males of this subspecies is of a more intense brown, the underside of the body is more reddish.
- F. c. africanus Levaillant , 1850 occurs from Morocco to northwestern Tunisia. The coat is lighter than in the nominate form, the top of the head of the male is blue-gray, the beak is light blue-gray with a black tip during the breeding season. Outside of the breeding season it is dull gray. The males have a small whitish spot on the neck. The females have gray, olive-brown plumage.
- F. c. spodiogenys Bonaparte , 1841 occurs in northwest Libya as well as in Tunisia. The species is only absent in northwestern Tunisia. The subspecies is similar to F. c. africanus , the males are paler blue-gray on the top of the head and also lighter on the underside of the body. The white spot on the neck is more noticeable and they show more white on the control springs. The female is also drawn paler.
- F. c. balearica from Jordans , 1923 occurs in Portugal, Spain and the Balearic Islands. This subspecies is slightly paler and larger than the nominate form.
- F. c. harterti Svensson , 2015 occurs in Libya.
- F. c. gengleri Kleinschmidt , 1909 occurs in Great Britain and Ireland. The subspecies was also introduced in South Africa. It is very similar to the nominate form, but has shorter wings and the males have a uniformly reddish-cinnamon-colored underside of the body.
- F. c. alexandrovi Zarudny , 1916
- F. c. caucasica Serebrovski , 1925 - Caucasus
- F. c. sarda Rapine , 1925 - Sardinia
- F. c. schiebeli Stresemann , 1925 - Crete
- F. c. solomkoi Menzbier & Sushkin , 1913 - Crimea
- F. c. syriaca J. M. Harrison , 1945 - Cyprus and the Levant
- F. c. transcaspia Zarudny , 1916 - Turkmenistan
- F. c. tyrrhenica Schiebel , 1910 - Corsica
- F. c. canariensis Vieillot , 1817 - Canary Islands
- Madeira Chaffinch ( F. c. Maderensis Sharpe , 1888) - Madeira
- F. c. moreletti Pucheran , 1859 - Azores
- F. c. ombriosa Hartert , 1913 - El Hierro , Canary Islands
- F. c. palmae Tristram , 1889 - West of the Canary Islands
literature
- Einhard Bezzel: birds. BLV Verlagsgesellschaft, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-405-14736-0 .
- C. Hilary Fry and Stuart Keith (Eds.): The Birds of Africa. Volume VII. Christopher Helm, London 2004, ISBN 0-7136-6531-9 .
- Collin Harrison and Peter Castell: Fledglings, Eggs and Nests of Birds in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Aula Verlag, Wiebelsheim 2004, ISBN 3-89104-685-5 .
- Maxime Metzmacher: La transmission du chant chez le Pinson des arbres (Fringilla c. Coelebs): phase sensible et rôle des tuteurs chez les oiseaux captifs . In: Alauda . tape 63 , 1995, pp. 123-134 (French, full text ).
- Maxime Metzmacher: Imitations et transmission culturelle dans le chant du Pinson des arbres Fringilla coelebs? In: Alauda . tape 84 , 2016, p. 203–220 (French, full text ).
- Maxime Metzmacher: L'apprentissage du chant chez le Pinson des arbres (Fringilla coelebs): une réévaluation des conclusions de Thorpe . In: Alauda . tape 84 , 2016, p. 237–239 (French, full text ).
Web links
- Singing chaffinch at www.vogelstimmen-wehr.de
- Fringilla coelebs in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2008. Posted by: BirdLife International, 2008. Accessed on December 18 of 2008.
- Videos, photos and sound recordings about Fringilla coelebs in the Internet Bird Collection
- Age and gender characteristics ( memento from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) by Javier Blasco Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze (PDF; 3.24 MB)
- Chaffinch's feathers
- Sonagrams of Chaffinch songs ( Fringilla coelebs )
Footnotes
- ↑ Fry et al., P. 452
- ↑ a b c d e f g Fry et al., P. 453
- ↑ a b Harrison, p. 430
- ↑ cf. C. Sudfeldt, R. Dröschmeister, C. Grüneberg, S. Jaehne, A. Mitschke, J. Wahl (Eds.): Birds in Germany - 2008 . DDA , BfN , LAG VSW, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-9811698-3-6 , p. 7 ( full text [PDF; 8.3 MB ; accessed on June 17, 2018]).
- ^ Ernst Perzina: Bird trade and love in Vienna. In: Ornithological Monthly , Volume 16 (1891): 455 - 465. ( PDF 1.6 MB )
- ↑ Josef Wessely: Wiener Finke hobby . In: Illustrierte Kronenzeitung, January 18, 1926, p. 7 ( online ); reprinted on December 17, 1934, p. 6 ( online )
- ↑ Neues Wiener Tagblatt, June 21, 1931, p. 9 ( online )
- ↑ a b Fry et al., P. 454
- ^ Harrison, p. 429
- ↑ Harrison, pp. 429-430
- ↑ Finches, euphonias, long spurs, Thrush-tanager "IOC World Bird List. Retrieved January 21, 2019 .