Bramblings are the northern counterpart of chaffinches, which they closely resemble in both shape and size. Breeding mainly in the huge birch forests of Scandinavia, the Baltic and Russia, they pour south every autumn to avoid the winter.
Most of these migratory finches head to central and southern Europe, where they occasionally gather in enormous blizzard-like flocks of several million birds, the biggest of any bird species ever recorded on the continent.
But they also visit Britain. Numbers vary, with more bramblings turning up in years when supplies of beech mast are scarce in mainland Europe – the seeds inside these prickly nuts are one of their favourite winter foods.
Bramblings and chaffinches feed the same way, scouring leaf litter and farmland stubble for fallen seeds, often in mixed flocks.
The northern visitors have a bright orange area on the chest and ‘shoulders’, but sometimes the easiest way to tell them apart is by looking for the bright white flash of their rumps whenever they take off.
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