Pied Wheatear

The pied wheatear is a migratory central Asian wheatear, about 14 cm long, occurring from the extreme south-east of Europe to China and found wintering in India and north-eastern Africa. The male is a boldly marked white-and-black bird, with a white crown tinged brown contrasting with the black face and throat and a white rump. The female is browner with a sandy-buff wash on the head, darker than female northern wheatears, smaller-looking and with less white on the rump. The tail feathers are white with characteristic black markings forming an inverted black T, resembling the tail of the western black-eared wheatear (Wikipedia, general species account).

It nests in open, stony, sparsely vegetated regions, laying four to six eggs in a hole, under a stone or in a rock crevice. It eats mainly insects but takes seeds too. The song is low-pitched and musical, performed by the male in early summer and again in August. It migrates to north-east Africa, passing through south-west Asia on the way, and is a very rare vagrant to western Europe. SoIB 2023 lists it as a summer migrant of alpine and cold desert that eats invertebrates, without a priority category (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).