Chaffinch
Cheery descender
The song of the chaffinch is a harbinger of early spring, and can often be heard before other birds have joined the chorus.
Chaffinches are one of our most widespread species, and can be heard across many habitats, though their numbers have declined sharply in recent years.
Song notes
Like several other common birds, the song of the chaffinch is a series of descending notes that ends in a flourish.
It is sometimes described as being like a bowler running in to deliver a cricket ball, though some imagination may be required here. Famously there are regional variations in the song, with many versions of the flourish at the end
The chaffinch typically delivers its notes from a tree, well above head height.
The song can be heard on bright days from early in the year. Listen out for it from February through the spring until early summer.
The ‘pink!’ alarm call is a useful clue to the presence of nearby predators, and gives rise to a local name in Northern England, ‘Spink’.
Another frequent but less obvious Chaffinch sound is a ‘huw-weet’.
This contact call sounds similar to a number of other birds, including chiffchaff and willow warbler, and is often given from the deep among the leaves. However, it is sometimes mixed with those more distinctive ‘pink!’ exclamations, which gives away the bird behind it.
Chaffinches were much prized for their song in Victorian Britain, when they were captured in large numbers and caged for competitions. Some practitioners would blind their birds with needles in an effort to concentrate the birds’ voices, a practice which Thomas Hardy decried in his poem The Blinded Bird.
Birds are bred in their thousands in parts of the near continent for vinkensport (‘finch sport’), a competition in which male chaffinches are rated on the number of phrases they can produce in an hour. In 2020 this became the subject of a production by Houston Grand Opera.
Media credits
Chaffinch image by Mika Luoma on Unsplash