Common Grasshopper Warbler

• Its song is a long, high, monotonous reeling that sounds like a cicada or the reel of a fishing rod, and can go on from a few seconds to two or three minutes with almost no pause for breath.
• It sings with its bill wide open and its whole body vibrating.
• It is one of the hardest birds to see in the Iberian avifauna: it is almost always detected by ear and rarely comes out into the open.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat & environment

Damp grassy scrub, heathland and rough grassland with bushes, often near water. In Spain it is restricted to the Eurosiberian Cantabrian belt, concentrated in the Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias, with residual numbers in northern Navarre and Galicia

Birth weight

Altricial: born blind, naked or with sparse down and entirely dependent

Size at birth

Altricial: born blind, naked or with sparse down and entirely dependent

Sexual maturity

12 months

Gestation / incubation

12-15 days of incubation

Litter / clutch size

4-6 eggs per clutch

Sources consulted: SEO/BirdLife (ficha y III Atlas de las aves en época de reproducción en España); IUCN Red List; Asturnatura; Carrera Buergo 2022, III Atlas; De Juana y García 2015, The Birds of the Iberian Peninsula; MITECO; Hagemeijer y Blair 1997, EBCC Atlas; Keller et al. 2020

Best time: From April to August, at dawn and above all at dusk, when it sings from inside the scrub