Description: Hawfinch standing on the ground, side-on view, facing to the right of the frame. The background is brown leaf litter.
The Hawfinch is a large finch with ginger-coloured head and black face markings around the thick grey bill. It has a brown back and wings with a prominent white wingbar, and peachy brown underparts.
The Hawfinch is a large finch, its most striking feature being its powerful, oversized, cone-shaped bill. Its diet includes fruits and insects, but that powerful beak really comes into its own when breaking into the kernels of cherries!
The plumage of the male and female birds is fairly similar, being predominantly rusty-brown and buff, with the male having slightly stronger colouring. An unusual seasonal change takes place in the colour of the Hawfinch’s bill; during the summer, the bill is grey-black, with a blueish base, whereas it turns a pale yellowish colour in the winter.
Hawfinches are not common anywhere in the UK, but your best chance of spotting one is probably in the south or east of England. Although there do seem to be some notable Hawfinch hotspots. For example, we have found the village of Parkend, close to the England-Wales border, to be a particularly good spot, especially in the coldest winter months.
For such a striking bird, its call (a short, harsh “pix”) can be quite hard to pick out, especially when other birds are also vocalising. One thing that I have found, however, is that the sound ID feature in the Merlin app is remarkably good at alerting you to the presence of nearby Hawfinches.
They tend to be rather shy, and often they are only seen high up in the tree canopy. The picture shown here was captured during a particularly fortunate encounter, when a male and female pair came down to forage in the leaf litter, right in front of one of the hides at the RPSB’s Nagshead reserve, in the Forest of Dean.