Chaffinch

Look for the white in the wings. Every Chaffinch, male or female, has a bold white patch on the shoulder with a white bar below it, and white sides to the tail that flash as it flies off.

The male is the colourful one: a blue-grey cap and nape, a pinkish-chestnut face and breast, a chestnut back and a yellowish-green rump. The female is a plain olive-brown version of him, buff-grey underneath, with the same white wing pattern.

A Chaffinch is 14.5 cm long, with a wingspan of 24.5 to 28.5 cm, and weighs 18 to 29 g. BTO measurements of live birds put the average adult at 21.8 g, males a little heavier than females.¹

British Chaffinches belong to the subspecies gengleri, with a browner face and deeper rufous underparts than most birds on the Continent. In autumn a male looks duller, because his new feathers have brownish tips; these wear off over the winter to reveal the bright spring colours. His bill is blue-grey with a dark tip for most of the year, the female's brownish.

Males and females are easy to tell apart. She has none of his blue-grey or pink: her head and back are greyish olive-brown, with a paler grey nape, and her underparts are dull buff, greyer on the breast. Her bill is brownish horn.

Young Chaffinches, seen in July and August, look like a dull female, and young males and females look alike. Look for a pale buffish patch on the back of the neck. For photos of each and how to tell them apart, see female Chaffinches.

Many people ask whether a bird is a Bullfinch or a Chaffinch. A male Bullfinch has a glossy black cap, a grey back, a deeper, purer pink breast, a stubby black bill and a white rump. He has one broad pale wing bar and no white shoulder patch. See Bullfinch or Chaffinch.

The Brambling, the Chaffinch's northern cousin, comes to Britain only in winter, from October to April, and often feeds with Chaffinches under feeders. Look at the rump as it flies: white on a Brambling of any age, green on a Chaffinch. A Brambling also has orange-brown shoulders and no white sides to its tail.²

You will often hear a Chaffinch before you see it. The song is a short, bright run of notes that tumbles down the scale and speeds up into a flourish at the end, repeated over and over from a perch in a tree or bush. Only males sing it, mainly from March to mid-July.

The commonest call is a sharp pink or chink, sometimes doubled. In flight, listen for a soft tsup. Males also give a loud, drawn-out hooeed, the "rain call", so called because it is often heard on wet or overcast days. It differs from region to region, and is one of the best-documented examples of a call dialect in any bird.³

Each male has two to four song types. In experiments at Cambridge in the 1950s, William Thorpe found that young Chaffinches raised alone developed only a rudimentary song, while young birds that heard adults copied the local dialect. It was the start of the modern study of how birds learn to sing.⁴

Almost anywhere with trees: gardens, parks, woods of every kind, hedgerows and farmland. The Chaffinch bred in 94% of the UK's 10-km squares in the last national atlas, missing only parts of the Northern Isles and Outer Hebrides and a few west-coast squares in Ireland.¹

You can see Chaffinches in every month. In winter they gather in flocks on stubble fields and under bird feeders, often with Bramblings, Greenfinches and House Sparrows.

In spring, listen for the song: a singing male sits up on the top of a bush or a branch. In winter, look on the ground under feeders and hedges, where Chaffinches shuffle along in little hops and steps, nodding their heads as they pick up seed.

British Chaffinches hardly move: 90% of ringing recoveries come from within 5 km of where the bird hatched. But every autumn large numbers arrive from Scandinavia and Finland. They reach south-east England mainly in the second half of October, spread north and west to Wales and Ireland, and leave again from late February to early May, males first.³ One study puts the winter increase at 30 to 50%.⁵

That explains the scientific name. Linnaeus called the Chaffinch coelebs, "bachelor", because the winter flocks he saw in Sweden were mostly males: the females had gone further south. Ringing shows the same split here, with winter migrants in Britain mostly males and those in Ireland mostly females.

Seeds for much of the year, insects in spring and summer. On the ground they pick up fallen seeds of weeds, grasses, cereals and trees such as beech; in spring they eat tree buds and hunt small insects and other invertebrates in trees and bushes. Their chicks are raised almost entirely on insects, mainly caterpillars and aphids.

More detail, from the seasons to feeding in gardens: what Chaffinches eat.

Chaffinches often feed on the ground under a feeder or bird table rather than on it. Sunflower hearts and a good seed mix, with little cereal, suit finches.

The RSPB's latest guidance (July 2026) is to put out seed only from 1 November to 30 April and pausing it from 1 May to 31 October, when disease spreads most easily; in summer it suggests small amounts of mealworms, fat or suet, which finches are less drawn to. Use hanging feeders rather than tables or trays, clean them every week and change the water every day.⁶

The female builds the nest alone: a neat, deep cup of moss, grass and roots, decorated with lichen and bound with spider silk, in the fork of a tree or bush. Lichen-covered, it is very hard to spot.

In Britain the first eggs are laid on 30 April on average, with first clutches between 12 April and 30 May. She lays 4 or 5 eggs, pale blue-green to reddish with purple-brown blotches, and incubates them alone for 12 to 13 days. The chicks leave the nest at 13 to 15.5 days old. Most pairs raise just one brood a year.¹

More: Chaffinch nests, eggs and young.

On the ground a Chaffinch moves in small, jerky hops or shuffling steps, nodding its head as it goes. In spring and summer pairs hold territories; outside the breeding season Chaffinches feed in flocks.

In courtship the male sleeks his feathers so the white wing bars stand out, crouches side-on to the female and raises one wing. In Britain, where Chaffinches stay put all year, a pair often stays together into later years.

A male Chaffinch that taps and flutters at a window is fighting his own reflection: he takes it for a rival in his territory. It usually eases off after the breeding season. To help him, cover the outside of the glass with a non-reflective film, or hang something in front of it that moves in the wind.⁷

It is an old story. In 1903 the naturalist C. B. Moffat described how he watched male Chaffinches and Blackbirds battling their reflections in his windows, and concluded that the birds were fighting over space, not over females.⁸

A Chaffinch that survives to breed typically lives about 3 years. About 59% of adults survive from one year to the next, and 53% of young birds survive their first year.¹

The oldest ringed Chaffinch in Britain and Ireland lived 13 years, 11 months and 26 days, a record set in 2011.¹ The oldest known anywhere, shot in Lithuania, was 21 years and 3 months old.¹¹

Crows, red and grey squirrels, cats, stoats and weasels all take eggs and chicks. In one large British sample of 10,967 eggs, 59% hatched, and 41% of those produced young that left the nest.³

The Chaffinch is Green-listed in the UK and of Least Concern worldwide, and there were still about 5.1 million territories in the UK in 2016. But it is no longer as common as it was. UK numbers rose by about a third from the early 1970s, then fell sharply from about 2010, and the breeding population is now 26% lower than in 1967.¹ It has dropped from the second to the fifth commonest bird in Britain.⁵

The decline has been linked to trichomonosis, a disease caused by a parasite that can spread between birds through shared food and water. It appeared in British finches in 2005, and by 2007 Chaffinch numbers had fallen 21% in the region where it was worst.⁹ Adult survival has fallen most around houses, where birds are fed. The BTO notes that the evidence is less strong for the Chaffinch than for the Greenfinch, and that other causes may be at work in the steeper fall since about 2012. In Wales the decline has put the Chaffinch on the Amber list.¹

You can help by keeping feeders clean, feeding seed in winter only, and stopping feeding for a while if you see sick birds. Signs and advice: feeder hygiene and disease.