Profile
In flight
Songbirds
Yellow-breasted Bunting
Emberiza aureola
- legendary
- 1100 km/h
- Critically Endangered
Once one of Eurasia's most common songbirds. Now Critically Endangered, eaten as a delicacy. Population down 95% since 1980.
- Population
- Roughly 120,000-600,000 mature individuals estimated globally, but the population has crashed by an estimated 84-95% over the last three generations due to mass illegal trapping on migration/wintering grounds; could not independently re-verify the exact current BirdLife/IUCN figure (DataZone JS-rendered, IUCN Red List 403s) so this is carried from secondary literature, not a live primary-source pull
- Habitat
- Breeds in open boreal/subarctic wet and dry meadows and taiga edge with scattered trees (willow, birch, alder), bushes and long grass near marshes or rivers; on migration and in winter uses cultivated land, rice paddies, reedbeds, scrub and grasslands
- Fun fact
- Once one of the most abundant songbirds in Eurasia, with a breeding range stretching from Finland to Japan, the Yellow-breasted Bunting collapsed by an estimated 90%+ in just a few decades due to mass illegal trapping in China, where migrating flocks were sold as the delicacy "rice bird," pushing it from Least Concern to Critically Endangered in barely 15 years (uplisted stepwise LC to VU in 2004, to EN in 2013, to CR in 2017).
- Range
- Breeds across a broad band of northern Eurasia from Finland/eastern Europe (now largely extirpated there) across Russia to Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands and northern Japan, south to Manchuria and North Korea; migrates through East and Southeast Asia to winter mainly in southern China, Southeast Asia (notably Myanmar) and parts of the Indian subcontinent; a rare vagrant to western Europe and has occurred as an accidental in Alaska and Canada
- Diet
- Insects, spiders and other invertebrates (especially when feeding young) plus seeds and grain, including wheat, rice and bamboo seeds, taken more heavily outside the breeding season
- Size
- 0.15 m
- Wingspan
- 0.23 m
- Lifespan
- 5 years
