Greenfinch Song and Calls: What Greenfinches Sound Like

This page is about the sounds Greenfinches make: the song with its long wheeze, the song flight, the calls, and when you will hear them, with recordings of each. For the bird itself, see Greenfinch identification, song and facts.

Listen for the wheeze. A singing Greenfinch mixes twittering and trilling notes with a long, drawn-out, nasal wheeze.^{1, 2, 3}

The full song is a run of phrases, repeated again and again. It mixes call notes, a dry nasal trill, and a rolling series of notes that rises and speeds up, broken by nasal notes and the drawn-out wheeze, written tsweee.³

It is not a fixed tune. A study of Greenfinch song from several places in Europe found the songs are built from a repertoire of 30 to 35 kinds of note, and that a given note can be followed by different kinds, so the order varies.⁴

In summer a territorial male repeats the nasal wheeze persistently. It is part of the song, given on its own.³

From the top of a tree or another high perch, or in flight. A singing male sits with his head held high and his body upright, wings held slightly out and wings and tail quivering.

Sometimes the male sings as he flies: a slow, rolling display flight on stiff wings, up to about 50 m over the treetops around where the pair nest.

Males sing from January, sometimes from late December, to mid-August, so the song is part of late winter and the whole breeding season.

Yes, but much less often and more weakly than males.

The contact call, used by birds keeping in touch with each other, is a fast twitter. There is also a harsh, single call note, a rising, anxious call when something worries them, a plaintive, rising alarm, and a sharp call when a predator is near.

Young birds being fed give soft, high begging notes, and young birds in autumn give a hard, short call. What young Greenfinches look like: young Greenfinches.

Greenfinches learn the details of their song. Most males in an area share the same kinds of note, while the exact shape of the notes differs from place to place, rising in one area and falling in another. The basic plan of the song, the number and basic shapes of its notes and the length and rhythm of its phrases, is the same everywhere it was studied.⁴

A Siskin sings a rapid jumble of thin, high, jangling notes, twitters, trills and wheezy notes, and calls with a clear, ringing note in flight.⁵ A Goldfinch's song is a fast, tinkling run of chirps, trills and warbling notes.⁶ See Siskin or Greenfinch.

The recordings on this page come from xeno-canto and carry open licences, credited under each one. Before using them we checked each recordist's notes and looked at a spectrogram of every clip to make sure it shows the sound described.

1. BTO. Greenfinch (Chloris chloris). BTO BirdFacts. Accessed 7 October 2026. Source
2. RSPB. Greenfinch. RSPB Birds A-Z. Accessed 7 October 2026. Source
3. Clement, P., de Juana, E. (2020). European Greenfinch (Chloris chloris), version 1.0. Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie and E. de Juana, editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology. doi:10.2173/bow.eurgre1.01
4. Güttinger, H. R. (1977). Variable and constant structures in Greenfinch songs (Chloris chloris) in different locations. Behaviour 60: 304-318. doi:10.1163/156853977x00252
5. Clement, P. (2020). Eurasian Siskin (Spinus spinus), version 1.0. Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo et al., editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology. doi:10.2173/bow.eursis.01
6. RSPB. Goldfinch. RSPB Birds A-Z. Accessed 7 October 2026. Source
7. xeno-canto contributors. xeno-canto recordings of Chloris chloris used on the song page. xeno-canto. Accessed 7 October 2026. Source