Chaffinch
Encyclopedia
The Chaffinch also called by a wide variety of other names, is a small passerine
Passerine
A passerine is a bird of the order Passeriformes, which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds, the passerines form one of the most diverse terrestrial vertebrate orders: with over 5,000 identified species, it has roughly...

 bird in the finch
Finch
The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found...

 family Fringillidae.

Description

The Chaffinch's large double white wing bars, white tail edges and greenish rump easily identify this 14–16 cm long species. The breeding male is unmistakable, with his reddish underparts and a blue-grey cap. The female is drabber and greener, but still obvious.

Etymology

The name chaffinch comes from Old English ceaffinc, literally "chaff
Chaff
Chaff is the dry, scaly protective casings of the seeds of cereal grain, or similar fine, dry, scaly plant material such as scaly parts of flowers, or finely chopped straw...

 finch
Finch
The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found...

", and is the source of the nickname chaffy or chaffie. The bird is so named for its tendency to peck the grain left out in farmyards, a habit which has also garnered it the names wheatbird and wheatsel-bird or wheatsel bird (from "wheatsel", a rare word meaning wheat drilling
Seed drill
A seed drill is a sowing device that precisely positions seeds in the soil and then covers them. Before the introduction of the seed drill, the common practice was to plant seeds by hand. Besides being wasteful, planting was very imprecise and led to a poor distribution of seeds, leading to low...

), the latter used primarily of male chaffinches (or "cock-chaffinches"). The names scobby, cobby, scoppy, and scop refer to this pecking ("scop" is a Cumbrian word meaning to hit).

The chaffinch's appearance has given rise to the names whitewing, white finch, copper finch, flecky flocker, pied finch, and robinet ("little robin
Robin redbreast
Robin redbreast may refer to any one of several species of birds that are not closely related:-In Europe:* European Robin, Erithacus rubecula, a small passerine bird in the Muscicapidae family...

"). The name shellapple or shillapple (also spelled sheldapple, sheldafle, or archaically sheldaple) is from "sheld", a rare word meaning variegated, and "dapple".
This name also appears in the metathetic
Metathesis (linguistics)
Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...

 forms apple-sheeler, its corruption upper shealer, and apple bird. The dialectal names shelly, skelly, sheely, shiltie, shilfer, shilfa, sheelfa, and shulfie are derived from these.

Spink and the less common names pink, pinkie, and pinkety are of the same Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 origin as finch
Finch
The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found...

(confer Greek spiza, chaffinch, and French pinson, finch), and are possibly imitative of the bird's song. This unique call has inspired the names twink, tweet, weet-weet, chink chink, chink chaffey, and pink twink. Popular belief holds that the chaffinch's song foretells rain, leading to the name wetbird.

The chaffinch is also known by the names beech finch, horse finch (and the variation hoose finch), buck finch, roberd, boldie, and the reduplicative shellapple shiltie. English naturalist Charles Swainson recorded 36 names for the chaffinch in his Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds (1885), including brichtie, brisk finch, briskie, bullspink, bully, charbob, daffinch, maze finch, pea finch, pine finch, and snabby.

Distribution and habitat

This bird is widespread and very familiar throughout Europe. It is the most common finch in western Europe, and the second most common bird in the British Isles
British Isles
The British Isles are a group of islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe that include the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and over six thousand smaller isles. There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and...

. Its range extends into western Asia, northwestern Africa, and Macaronesia
Macaronesia
Macaronesia is a modern collective name for several groups of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean near Europe and North Africa belonging to three countries: Portugal, Spain, and Cape Verde...

, where it has many distinctive island forms. In the Canary Islands
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...

 of Tenerife
Tenerife
Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of the seven Canary Islands, it is also the most populated island of Spain, with a land area of 2,034.38 km² and 906,854 inhabitants, 43% of the total population of the Canary Islands. About five million tourists visit Tenerife each year, the...

 and Gran Canaria
Gran Canaria
Gran Canaria is the second most populous island of the Canary Islands, with a population of 838,397 which constitutes approximately 40% of the population of the archipelago...

, the Chaffinch has colonised twice, giving rise to the endemic
Endemism in birds
An endemic bird area is a region of the world that contains two or more restricted-range species, while a "secondary area" contains one or more restricted-range species. Both terms were devised by Birdlife International....

 species known as the Blue Chaffinch
Blue Chaffinch
The Blue Chaffinch, Fringilla teydea, is a species of passerine bird in the finch family Fringillidae. It is endemic to the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria in Spain's Canary Islands...

 and a distinctive subspecies
Subspecies
Subspecies in biological classification, is either a taxonomic rank subordinate to species, ora taxonomic unit in that rank . A subspecies cannot be recognized in isolation: a species will either be recognized as having no subspecies at all or two or more, never just one...

. In each of the Azores
Azores
The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...

, in Madeira
Madeira
Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

, and in the rest of the Canaries there is a single species on each island.

It was introduced from Britain into a number of its overseas territories in the 18th and 19th centuries. In New Zealand it is a common species. In South Africa a very small breeding colony in the suburbs of Constantia
Constantia
- People :* Flavia Julia Constantia, daughter of Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus and Flavia Maximiana Theodora* Flavia Maxima Constantia, daughter of Constantius II and his third wife Faustina...

, Hout Bay
Hout Bay
Hout Bay is the name of a coastal suburb of Cape Town, South Africa with a mix of neighbourhoods from the very rich to the very poor. It lies in a valley on the Atlantic Seaboard of the Cape Peninsula and is twenty kilometres south of the Central Business District of Cape Town...

 and Camps Bay
Camps Bay
Camps Bay is an affluent suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. In summer it attracts a large number of foreign visitors as well as South Africans looking for a beach holiday. It is renowned for its white sandy beaches fringed by palm trees and has a trendy nightlife.-History:The first residents of...

 near Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

 is the only remnant of one such introduction.

It uses a range of habitats, but open woodland is favoured, although it is common in gardens and on farmland.

Subspecies

Many subspecies of the Chaffinch have been described, though not all are always concurrently accepted. They include:

Subspecies occurring in continental Eurasia, North Africa and on Mediterranean islands:
  • F. c. africana J. Levaillant, 1850 – north-west Africa, from Morocco
    Morocco
    Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

     to western Tunisia
    Tunisia
    Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...

  • F. c. alexandrovi Zarudny
    Nikolai Zarudny
    Nikolai Alekseyvich Zarudny was a Ukrainian-Russian explorer and zoologist of Ukrainian origin, who studied the fauna, especially the birds of Central Asia. He was born in Gryakovo, Ukraine . He wrote his first ornithology book in 1896 and made five expeditions in the Caspian region from 1884 and...

    , 1916 – southern Caspian region
    Caspian Sea
    The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. The sea has a surface area of and a volume of...

    , from the Talysh
    Talysh Mountains
    Talysh Mountains is a mountain chain in northwestern Iran, and southeastern Republic of Azerbaijan in the northwest section of the Elburz Mountains, extending southeastward from the Lankaran Lowland in southeast Azerbaijan to the lower part of the Sefid Rud in northwest Iran...

     to the Alborz Ranges
    Alborz
    Alborz , also written as Alburz, Elburz or Elborz, is a mountain range in northern Iran stretching from the borders of Azerbaijan and Armenia in the northwest to the southern end of the Caspian Sea, and ending in the east at the borders of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan...

  • F. c. balearica Von Jordans, 1923 – Iberian Peninsula
    Iberian Peninsula
    The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...

     and the Balearic Islands
    Balearic Islands
    The Balearic Islands are an archipelago of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.The four largest islands are: Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera. The archipelago forms an autonomous community and a province of Spain with Palma as the capital...

  • F. c. caucasica Serebrovski, 1925 – Caucasus
    Caucasus
    The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...

  • F. c. coelebs Linnaeus, 1758 – Eurasia, from western Europe
    Western Europe
    Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...

     and Asia Minor
    Asia Minor
    Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...

     to Siberia
    Siberia
    Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

  • F. c. gengleri O. Kleinschmidt
    Otto Kleinschmidt
    Otto Kleinschmidt was a German theologist, pastor and ornithologist. He introduced a typological species concept into German ornithology. His Formenkreis theory influenced the early ideas of Erwin Stresemann. Others have considered him one of the first biogeographers...

    , 1909 – British Isles
  • F. c. sarda Rapine, 1925 – Sardinia
    Sardinia
    Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...

  • F. c. schiebeli Erwin Stresemann
    Erwin Stresemann
    Erwin Stresemann was a German naturalist and ornithologist.Stresemann was one of the outstanding ornithologists of the 20th century...

    , 1925 – Crete
    Crete
    Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...

  • F. c. solomkoi Menzbier
    Mikhail Aleksandrovich Menzbier
    Mikhail Aleksandrovich Menzbier was a Russian ornithologist. Based in Moscow, he was a founding member of Russia’s first ornithological body, the Kessler Ornithological Society. One of his major areas of work was on the taxonomy of birds of prey...

     & Sushkin, 1913 – Crimean Peninsula
    Crimea
    Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...

  • F. c. spodiogenys Bonaparte
    Charles Lucien Bonaparte
    Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, 2nd Prince of Canino and Musignano was a French naturalist and ornithologist.-Biography:...

    , 1841 – eastern Tunisia
    Tunisia
    Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...

  • F. c. syriaca J. M. Harrison, 1945 – Cyprus
    Cyprus
    Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

     and the Levant
    Levant
    The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

  • F. c. transcaspia Zarudny
    Nikolai Zarudny
    Nikolai Alekseyvich Zarudny was a Ukrainian-Russian explorer and zoologist of Ukrainian origin, who studied the fauna, especially the birds of Central Asia. He was born in Gryakovo, Ukraine . He wrote his first ornithology book in 1896 and made five expeditions in the Caspian region from 1884 and...

    , 1916 – Turkmenian
    Turkmenistan
    Turkmenistan , formerly also known as Turkmenia is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic . Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states...

     – Khorasan ranges (from the Kopet-Dag in the north to the Khaidari Mountains in the south)
  • F. c. tyrrhenica Schiebel, 1910 – Corsica
    Corsica
    Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the island of Sardinia....



Subspecies of the Macaronesia
Macaronesia
Macaronesia is a modern collective name for several groups of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean near Europe and North Africa belonging to three countries: Portugal, Spain, and Cape Verde...

n radiation
:
  • F. c. canariensis Vieillot
    Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot
    Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot was a French ornithologist.Vieillot described a large number of birds for the first time, especially those he encountered during the time he spent in the West Indies and North America, and 26 genera established by him are still in use...

    , 1817 – central Canary Islands
    Canary Islands
    The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...

  • F. c. maderensis Sharpe
    Richard Bowdler Sharpe
    Richard Bowdler Sharpe was an English zoologist.-Biography:Sharpe was born in London and studied at Brighton College, The King's School, Peterborough and Loughborough Grammar School. At the age of sixteen he went to work for Smith & Sons in London...

    , 1888 (Madeiran Chaffinch
    Madeiran Chaffinch
    The Madeiran Chaffinch is a small passerine bird in the finch family Fringillidae. It is a subspecies of the Chaffinch that is endemic to the Portuguese island of Madeira, part of Macaronesia in the North Atlantic Ocean. It is locally known as the Tentilhão.- Description :The male is more...

    ) – Madeira
    Madeira
    Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

  • F. c. moreletti Pucheran
    Jacques Pucheran
    Jacques Pucheran was a French zoologist.Pucheran accompanied the expedition on the Astrolabe between 1837 and 1840, under the command of Jules Dumont d'Urville, with fellow-naturalists Jacques Bernard Hombron and Honoré Jacquinot...

    , 1859 – Azores
    Azores
    The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...

  • F. c. ombriosa Hartert
    Ernst Hartert
    Ernst Johann Otto Hartert was a German ornithologist. Hartert was born in Hamburg. He was employed by Lionel Walter Rothschild as ornithological curator of his private museum at Tring from 1892 to 1929....

    , 1913 – El Hierro
    El Hierro
    El Hierro, nicknamed Isla del Meridiano , is the smallest and farthest south and west of the Canary Islands , in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, with a population of 10,162 .- Name :The name El Hierro, although phonetically identical to the Spanish word for 'iron', is generally thought...

    , Canary Islands
  • F. c. palmae Tristram
    Henry Baker Tristram
    The Reverend Henry Baker Tristram FRS was an English clergyman, Biblical scholar, traveller and ornithologist.Tristram was born at Eglingham vicarage, near Alnwick, Northumberland, and studied at Durham School and Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1846 he was ordained a priest, but he suffered from...

    , 1889 (La Palma Chaffinch
    La Palma Chaffinch
    The La Palma Chaffinch , also known as the Palman Chaffinch or, locally in Spanish as the Pinzón Palmero or Pinzón hembra, is a small passerine bird in the finch family Fringillidae...

    ) – western Canary Islands

Behaviour

This bird is not migratory
Bird migration
Bird migration is the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds. Bird movements include those made in response to changes in food availability, habitat or weather. Sometimes, journeys are not termed "true migration" because they are irregular or in only one direction...

 in the milder parts of its range, but vacates the colder regions in winter. The coelebs part of its name means "bachelor". This species was named by Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...

; in his home country of Sweden, where the females depart in winter, but the males often remain. This species forms loose flocks outside the breeding season, sometimes mixed with Brambling
Brambling
The Brambling, Fringilla montifringilla, is a small passerine bird in the finch family Fringillidae.- Etymology :The common English name is probably derived from the German "brâma", meaning bramble or a thorny bush. It has also been called the Cock o' the North and the Mountain Finch.- Description...

s. This bird occasionally strays to eastern North America, although some sightings may be escapees.

It builds its nest in a tree fork, and decorates the exterior with moss or lichen
Lichen
Lichens are composite organisms consisting of a symbiotic organism composed of a fungus with a photosynthetic partner , usually either a green alga or cyanobacterium...

 to make it less conspicuous. It lays about six eggs, which are greenish-blue with purple speckling.

The main food of the chaffinch is seed
Seed
A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

s, but unlike most finches, the young are fed extensively on insect
Insect
Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

s, and adults also eat insects in the breeding season.

The powerful song is very well known, and its fink or vink sounding call gives the finch family its English name. Males typically sing two or three different song types, and there are regional dialects too.

The acquisition by the young chaffinch of its song was the subject of an influential study by British ethologist William Thorpe
William Homan Thorpe
William Homan Thorpe FRS was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a significant British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist....

. Thorpe determined that if the chaffinch is not exposed to the adult male's song during a certain critical period
Critical period
This article is about a critical period in an organism's or person's development. See also America's Critical Period.In general, a critical period is a limited time in which an event can occur, usually to result in some kind of transformation...

 after hatching, it will never properly learn the song. He also found that in adult chaffinches, castration eliminates song, but injection of testosterone induces such birds to sing even in November, when they are normally silent.

In captivity

The chaffinch is a popular pet bird in many countries. In Belgium, the ancient traditional sport of vinkenzetting pits male chaffinches against one another in a contest for the most bird calls in an hour.

In culture

The Chaffinch is depicted in a marginal decoration of the 15th century English illuminated manuscript the Sherborne Missal
Sherborne Missal
The Sherborne Missal is a 15th century English illuminated manuscript missal in the British Library that has survived in excellent condition. It weighs 20 kg and has 347 leaves. It was commissioned by Abbott Robert Bruyning of Sherborne, and was made for use at Sherborne Abbey...

.

External links



Listen to the chaffinch at:
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/radio/dawn_chorus/video/chaffinch_song.ram
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/birdsong-chaffinch.ram
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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