On 26th November 2025 local birder Clive Williams found two Lesser Whitethroats around Seaton Bowling Green. The first record of this species on patch during the winter months.
I first saw them the following day, and have since spent plenty of time with them in a variety of different weather conditions and lights. Most often I would just see one of the birds, with only three of my visits revealing both birds. During a visit on 2nd January I suspected there were three present with two birds in front of me whilst I could hear what sounded like a third calling way to my south, however as this has never been confirmed I will only be submitting the two birds.
Two birds remain today, they really do look settled in for the winter along with several Blackcap and Black Redstarts feeding on the same rich supply of berries and insects.
Out-of-season Lesser Whitethroats have been turning up in very small numbers in the UK for decades, however this must be the first time that more than one bird has wintered in one location?
Am sure like most birders, any report of a wintering Lesser Whitethroat will immediately make you wonder whether it is a bird from an eastern or Siberian population. And although this is usually only provable by DNA analysis, I thought I would look in detail at these birds as in my opinion there are several features that set them apart from a typical C. c. curruca.
Before I go into these details and just to set the foundations, Lesser Whitethroat is currently split into several sub species, of which there are three on the British List. Something I didn't realise until I was penning this is that Lesser Whitethroat and other similar species have recently been split out of the Sylvia genus and into the genus Curruca - not sure how I missed that!
C. c. curruca - This is the subspecies we are used too, breeding across temperate Europe and Asia, including England, Wales and southern Scotland. It winters in Africa (south of the Sahara), Arabia, and India, arriving in European breeding grounds from mid-April and departing by autumn.
C. c. blythi - The Siberian Lesser Whitethroat is a subspecies whose breeding range extends across Siberia and Central Asia, wintering in regions from Iran to India and sometimes reaching Europe as a vagrant or scarce migrant.
C. c halimodendri - The Central Asian Lesser Whitethroat breeds across the steppes and dry regions of Central Asia, including parts of Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia, wintering in Southwest Asia, and is considered a rare visitor to Western Europe and there has been a total of eight accepted records in the UK since 2003.
Structure
Size-wise they look like any Lesser Whitethroats to me, however presumably due to the shorter wings than what we see in curruca they often appear long-tailed, at times looking even a bit Long-tailed Tit-like (figure 1)!
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| Figure 1. The smaller bird feeding high in 'the Clock Tower tree' |
The plainer of the two birds does appear to be slightly smaller, have a shorter wing and has a more delicate bill. The bill size of the other bird wouldn't look out of sorts on a curruca in my opinion.
Plumage and Bare Parts
From my first views of the birds, I would not have expected to have been able to write as much as I can in this section, but the more I have looked at them the more I noticed.
The main striking difference is that overall they are brown birds (figure 2), not the grey and white of curruca (figure 3). The smaller bird looks slightly sandier in colour to me than the larger one, and looks plainer in its overall appearance.
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| Figure 2. The larger bird in dull pre-sunrise light |
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| Figure 3. A first-year curruca that I trapped and ringed at Beer Head on 2/9/15 - a completely different looking bird! |
Head
Both birds show a really striking difference compared to curruca on their head, with the brown of the birds mantle creeping up into their hind neck and over the crown. Both birds also show a far less distinct eye-mask than you'd usually expect on a Lesser Whitethroat. The larger bird has a clear brown patch within the darker mask (figure 4), and the smaller bird has such a subtle mask that from some angles it doesn't look like it has a mask at all (figure 5)!
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| Figure 5. Note the warm brown patch on eye mask just below the eye, shows brown eye-lores too |
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| Figure 6. The smaller bird, almost no mask to mention at all |
Both birds have small line of white eye-liner under the eye, and a suggestion of a short and weak white supercilium over their eyes.
Wing
Tertials appear more Common Whitethroat-like, with solid dark centres and very neat pale brown edges. Otherwise the rest of the flight feathers are the same tone of brown, except for slightly darker primaries with neat pale tips (figure 7).
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| Figure 7. On this view you could almost call this a Common Whitethroat. |
Underparts
There's quite a big difference here with the two birds. The larger bird has buff flanks with a cleaner centre to its belly and breast, whereas the smaller bird is more solidly buff underneath up to its throat and right down to its lower flanks. Both have clean white throats, but due to the darker underparts of the smaller bird this one shows the greatest contrast (figure 8), whereas the white throat of the larger bird bleeds into the central breast area.
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| Figure 8. Can't get much more 'white throat' than that! |
Tail
A crucial factor in Lesser Whitethroat subspecies identification, but for me seeing a spread tail proved just as hard as capturing a photo of one! However I can confirm both birds have the amount of white that you'd hope to see on the outer tail feathers, with white on both sides of the feather spine, touching the spine on both sides (figure 9).
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| Figure 9. Not a great photo but you can see the extent of the white and the feather spine. This was the smaller bird. |
Ideally there could be some pale on the tips of T5, and although I have seen some photos that suggest the smaller bird may have a small buff-tip, it's not striking enough for me to be certain.
Bare parts
Although the bill size between the two of them does vary, colour-wise they are identical being mostly pale with a dark-tip to the upper and lower mandibles.
The larger bird has a slightly brighter and a paler iris colour, compared to the dull brown-grey iris of the smaller bird. This could well be an age thing as Lesser Whitethroat eyes change colour as they age.
Both birds have grey legs, with pinky tones around the feet. My impression is that the smaller bird has a little more pink than the larger bird, but would like better views to confirm this.
Vocalisations
I actually heard the Seaton Lesser Whitethroats before I saw them, and was immediately struck by a Wren-like rattle, interspersed with some isolated and more typical Lesser Whitethroat soft 'tek' calls (sound clip 1). The rattle call is not anything I have ever heard from curruca birds.
Although I do own a sound recorder, it wasn't with me when I needed it so all the below sound clips have been captured by recording video on my Nikon P950. I then converted the videos to MP3 sound files using an online platform.
Sound clip 1
When I first heard the rattle, having previously been aware of a Tit-like trill that halimodendri utter, I was really excited. However that evening after some researching it was clear that the call of these birds were not really Tit-like, and that a typical feature of blythi is indeed a Wren-like rattle. The fact they would also utter the single 'tek' call is another pro-blythi feature.
During milder and sunnier spells of weather, the larger bird would often also break into subsong, quietly muttering a rather generic Sylvia/Curruca warble (sound clip 2). I don't expect this to be any use in subspecies identification and have in the past heard male curruca sound similar, lacking any of the typical rattles, however it does at least confirm that at least one of the birds present is a male. If it stays into early spring I wonder if it will break into a fuller song which would be very interesting to hear.
Sound clip 2
Behaviour
It's impossible to pinpoint how much of the birds behaviour is down to the environment they are in and the food source they are using, or whether any of it is because of their subspecies-traits. So treat this section with caution as I would not at all be surprised if a wintering curruca in the same setting feeding on the same food would behave exactly the same.
Saying that, with the vast majority of my previous UK Lesser Whitethroat experience being migrant and breeding curruca between April and October, the behaviour of these birds is completely alien to me for a Lesser Whitethroat.
They are quite happy picking off insects or buds, in the highest parts of larger bare trees - very much in the fashion that a Long-tailed Tit would. One of the birds in particular can often be found in the tops of a large bare tree near the Clock Tower. Based on what we are used to seeing with this species in the UK, I would bet against any birder looking up at it without binoculars and thinking 'there's a Lesser Whitethroat'. Just so un-Lesser Whitethroat-like!
However, most notably during periods of colder weather and in more recent weeks, they have completely flipped and suddenly I am seeing them often below knee height (my knees that is), foraging in garden plants and even hopping around on patches of bare ground/grass. This would often catch me out if I didn't know one was already there, walking around looking in the trees then suddenly I'd hear a 'tek' and see the white outer tail feathers as one explodes out from near my feet.
What seems to be their favoured food source is the white berries of the Cabbage Palm trees in the gardens and the Pitch and Putt green. They can often be elusive feeding on these, however sometimes you'll be lucky and they will be sat out almost motionless munching away. The Black Redstarts have been really enjoying these too. Occasionally they'd disappear into nearby gardens and not reappear for sometime, so they aren't always guaranteed.
For a map of their location and favoured spots, see figure 10 and the below text.
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| Figure 10. Prime Seaton Lesser Whitethroat habitat. |
1. This is where I most often would see one or two birds, with the larger bird being particularly fond of this area. This is always where he was when I heard him softly singing. Also worth noting at times the birds were seen to fly into neighbouring gardens from here.
2. The main crop of berries are here, and the birds would often flit between the palms here are larger bare trees on the northern boundary of the green.
3. In this area is the large tree by the Clock Tower as mentioned above, as well as some apples that were supplied by local birder Kevin Hale, offering them an alternative food source. It didn't take the the birds long to find them, particularly the smaller bird that seems to prefer this area.
Summary
As the rest of this post is rather long and wordy, I will keep this bit brief.
Without DNA analysis can I say with certain what they are, probably not. However I am certain that the two Seaton Lesser Whitethroats are not of the subspecies curruca and I strongly believe they are of the subspecies blythi. This is based off my observations of their structure, plumage and vocalisations, the latter being key in ruling out halimodendri.
The visual differences between the two birds could be down to one or more factors. The larger bird is the one that was heard subsinging, so we know this a male. If the smaller bird was a female this could well account for many of the differences. Or it could of course be down to where they have each originated from, could the plainer and short-winged bird suggest it's a purer blythi coming from deeper inside the known range? Quite possibly I would suspect.
I don't think we will be able to get DNA anaylsis of either of these birds, unless something drastic happens, so presumably nothing will come of all this. However it's been a real pleasure having them with us, and it's been so enjoyable and eye-opening spending as much time with them as I have. Every time I learnt something more it felt like a mini-win.
And that's that! Make of it what you wish!
References
Birding Frontiers; Siberian and Dessert Lesser Whitethroats: https://birdingfrontiers.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/siberian-and-desert-lesser-whitethroats-2/
BOURC: https://bou.org.uk/
Nick's Bird Blog; The Identification of the 'Lesser Whitethroat' species complex: https://nicksbird.blog/2023/06/11/identification-of-the-lesser-whitethroat-species-complex/
Wildlife Diaries; Siberian Lesser Whitethroat - Spurn - 9th - 12th October: https://andybutlerdiaries.blogspot.com/2020/10/siberian-lesser-whitethroat-spurn-9th.html
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to Clive for finding these birds originally, and all the local birders who have assisted me with my wants and needs since (particularly Tim C).
Also a big thank you to everyone who offered me their often MUCH better photos to help illustrate this post, however I decided to use just what I've managed to capture for now. I may well do another post with a few of the best though.
And finally, thanks to you for reading!
Lovely informative and well researched post Steve, and great to hear your thoughts with you having spent so much time with them.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much to be said for spending time observing and getting to know birds! Thanks again.