All species › Passerines › Wagtails and pipits › Western Yellow Wagtail
Western Yellow Wagtail | Motacilla flava
Gele kwikstaart | Lavandera boyera
The Yellow Wagtail is the bird of low, wet, green country: of pasture with cattle, of potato and beet fields, of saltmarsh and polder. In May the male sits on the topmost stem of a tussock or on a barbed-wire fence, brighter yellow than anything around it, and gives a short, rising psree. What makes the species special is the head: from the British Isles to Anatolia it wears a different pattern in each region, from yellow through blue-grey to jet black, and all those forms belong to the same species. In May different forms sometimes stand together in one meadow.
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Subspecies
Voice
The call is a full, slightly rising tswee-eep, loud and musical for so small a bird, usually given in flight and often the first sign that a party is coming over the field. Northern and Balkan birds call harsher and more rasping, with an obvious buzz in the tone, and anyone who hears that difference looks twice, which is exactly the point. The song is simple: two to four thin, scraping notes, tsree-tsree-tsrip, repeated from a stem, a wire or a clod, sometimes in a short fluttering song flight. Heard from late April into July.
Recording: Kevin Guille — CC0 · xeno-canto
Identification
Smaller and markedly shorter-tailed than the other wagtails, 15 to 16 cm, with black legs and a fine black bill. The upperparts are olive to yellow-green — never grey — and the underparts yellow, on a spring male a clean lemon that carries right through to the under tail coverts. The wing is dark with two narrow pale bars, the tail black with white outer feathers, and the tail is wagged constantly, though in shorter, busier jerks than a Pied Wagtail's. Females are duller, greenish-brown above and pale yellow to off-white below, with a vague pale supercilium. Autumn juveniles are buff-brown with a dark loral line, a creamy supercilium and a necklace of dark spots; they can show almost no yellow at all, and then the olive-green mantle, the short tail and the call are what to work from. Flight is deeply undulating and low over the crop.
Confusion species
The work is not with other species but with the forms of this one. In spring the male's head is the key, and it can be read with four questions. Is the whole head yellow-green, with a yellow supercilium and a yellow throat? Then it is flavissima, the British Yellow Wagtail, which breeds in the British Isles and passes elsewhere in the map area, such as along the Atlantic and Cantabrian coasts and the near Continent, in small numbers along the coast. Is the crown blue-grey with a long, clean white supercilium running from the bill to the nape, a white stripe below the cheek and a yellow throat? Then it is the nominate flava, the Blue-Headed Wagtail, which breeds in western and central Europe and most of the rest of the Continent, is a common passage migrant in Iberia, and appears in the British Isles only in small numbers each spring with occasional breeding. Is the head dark with no supercilium at all, but the throat yellow? Then it is either thunbergi, the Grey-Headed Wagtail of Fennoscandia and north-eastern Europe, slate-grey with a blackish ear patch, or feldegg, the Black-Headed Wagtail of the Balkans and Anatolia, glossy jet black from crown to nape. Is the head grey and the throat white? Then you are in the south-west: iberiae, the breeding form of Iberia, the adjacent lands north of the Pyrenees and the Maghreb, shows a short white supercilium mainly behind the eye; cinereocapilla of the Apennine Peninsula and the Adriatic shows at most a white spot and turns up on the Iberian Peninsula now and then as a vagrant. Watch also for mixing: pairings of flava and flavissima produce pale-headed intermediates, the so-called Channel Wagtail, which are best left unassigned. Females and autumn birds usually cannot be placed at all, and that is fine. Beyond the species, confusion is slight: Grey Wagtail is longer-tailed, blue-grey above with a yellow-green rump and pink legs; young Citrine Wagtails are grey and white with no olive anywhere and two very broad white wing bars.
Habitat
Open, low, damp ground with no tall vegetation, a few lookout perches and plenty of insects: extensively grazed pasture, saltmarsh and grazing meadows outside the dykes, damp hay meadows and, nowadays above all, arable fields with a dense but not too tall crop — potatoes, beet, cereals, lucerne. Livestock helps, because the flies gather around cattle and horses and the birds walk between their feet. The nest is a scrape on the ground under a grass tussock or between the potato ridges. On passage on saltmarsh, muddy margins, sewage works and bare fields, usually in loose parties.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds from the British Isles east deep into Siberia and from northern Scandinavia south to North Africa and Anatolia, and winters almost entirely in sub-Saharan Africa. In north-west Europe it has declined sharply and shifted from grassland to arable; in the British Isles the breeding range has contracted to the east and centre of the main island, and the island of Ireland has lost it as a regular breeder. Around the Mediterranean the breeding form is chiefly iberiae, in wet meadows, rice fields and irrigated land; in April and May and again in August and September large numbers of all forms pass through, and in winter it is all but absent.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The first half of May, on a sunny, windless morning, along a saltmarsh, a polder lane, a rice field or a newly emerging arable field. Look for the yellow dot on top of a tussock or on the wire and take your time over the head: with the sun behind you the difference between a blue crown with a white supercilium and a slate crown without one is visible at fifty metres. Mid-May is the best chance of the northern form, which passes last, often in small parties on North Sea saltmarshes; in Iberia a white throat points to the local iberiae and a yellow throat to a migrant from elsewhere. In August walk the same ground for the brown juveniles and work from the olive mantle, the short tail and the call.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, but in western Europe one of the farmland birds with the clearest decline. The causes run together: the loss of damp, herb-rich, extensively grazed grassland; early and frequent mowing, so that ground nests fail; the drying-out of polders; and, across the board, fewer insects. Where the species holds on it is nearly always on arable land, and there the same management helps as for Skylark: herb-rich margins, later field operations and crops that give cover into June. In the Mediterranean and eastern Europe numbers are considerably more stable.
Scientific name
Motacilla flava | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Motacilla in that same work. Motacilla was the Roman name for the wagtail; it is really a diminutive of motare 'to move about', but from medieval times -cilla was wrongly taken to mean 'tail'. flava is Latin for 'golden-yellow', after the yellow underparts. The specimen the first description was based on came from southern Sweden.