FIRECREST (Regulus ignicapillus) Roitelet triple-bandeau GOLDCREST (Regulus regulus) Roitelet huppé
Firecrest © Frank Jarvis
SUMMARY
Two small warblers very similar in appearance habits and sounds. This entry will help you identify them.
I am breaking with the normal pattern of Wildechoes species accounts and combining two species on one page here, this is because these two are very similar in habits and particularly hard to tell apart, either visually or audibly, and doing it this way will make it easier to do the comparisons.
Goldcrest © Arlette Berlie
So what makes them so hard to tell apart ? Well for a start they are the two smallest birds in Europe, weighing in at a mighty 6g they are about 30% smaller than a small warbler like a Chiffchaff. At that size they have, for their size, a huge need for food to keep themselves warm and so are constantly active looking for food and never seem still. This activity also usually takes place in the upper parts of the pine trees that form their favoured habitat, and they are both a similar coloration to each other and to the trees they sit in. All in all they are about as difficult as you can get !
Firecrest © Arlette Berlie
In Switzerland they can both be found throughout the year, although the Firecrest is rare in winter. In both cases the winter birds are most likely migrants from further north. The Goldcrest has a range which extends much further east than the Firecrest, but both are birds of montane forests, reaching their greatest densities between about 1000 and 1800m, the Firecrest dropping out a little faster as you go higher. In recent times the Firecrest has extended its range across the alps.
Firecrest © Arlette Berlie
The English common names are misleading because both have crest colours that are pretty much the same - a sort of yellow-ish orange crown set on top of a black stripe. The main visual difference is identified in the French name of the Firecrest - "triple-bandeau", because the Firecrest has a white eyebrow (or supercilium to use the technical term), which is topped by the black stripe and then a crown stripe which is a lite more orange than the Goldcrest, but that can be very hard to see. But this gives the Firecrest a sort of stripey appearance with the three colours - so look out for that white above the eye, don't look at the crest despite the names !
They are a little easier to tell apart by voice, except that a bird this size does not make a loud noise and both use very high frequencies and so it can be very hard to hear (especially for those of a certain age, like me, who may be losing their high frequency hearing). Let's deal with each in turn:
GOLDCREST / Roitelet huppé
This bird has a very pleasant little song that has a few introductory notes with a sort of rhythmic cycling motion to them and is then terminated by a flourish of variable notes:
Here is a still of the sonogram, you can see the introduction and the terminal flourish and I have drawn on it in red the up and down rhythm at the start which I find quite distinctive in the field:
Goldcrest song: rhythmic up and downs finished by a terminal flourish
Here is a longish sonogram, try and look out for that rhythmic start to each phrase. Note also that phrase 3 does not have the terminal flourish and this sometimes happens, but the start notes are just the same. Also the terminal flourish is quite variable in the other phrases:
Goldcrest song (note the third phrase lacks the terminal flourish)
FIRECREST / Roitelette triple-bandeau
By comparison the Firecrest song is rather monotonous - like the Goldcrest, very high pitched, it is a series of simple notes starting out at about 7Khz rising ever so slightly during each phrase to finish at about 7.5Khz, each phrase has a sort of "buzzy" tone to it:
If we look at the still of the sonogram you can get the idea:
Firecrest song: steadily rising high-pitched notes with no flourish
Notice that each of the final few notes in each phrase has a sort of tremolo or modulated effect to it, maybe this is what makes them sound a little "buzzy" ?
Here is a sonogram of three song phrases:
Firecrest song: showing the steady rise in tone in each phrase and the more static nature of the song
COMPARISON:
To summarise it all here are both birds compared - Goldcrest first and Firecrest second:
Two phrases of Goldcrest followed by two phrases of Firecrest
To finish with, in case I seem to be setting too many fixed rules here, all vocalisations can change according to circumstances. Here is a Firecrest that had an interaction with a Robin, if you follow the sonogram (where the timings are all as they were originally) you hear a normal Firecrest song at about 2s, then it encountered a Robin and completely broke its normal song pattern at 8s, the Robin replied at 9s and then the Firecrest continued as normal at 10s - just a brief inter-specific encounter, I am not sure who was being aggressive to whom however:
So which is it? © Arlette Berlie (see bottom of page)
(firecrest)
