Critically Endangered
Yellow-breasted Bunting
Emberiza aureola
The yellow-breasted bunting is a passerine bird in the bunting family Emberizidae that is found across the Boreal and East Palearctic.
Appearance
The yellow-breasted bunting is a small passerine, ranging from 14 to 16 cm (5.5 to 6.3 in) in length, and weighing 17 to 26 g (0.6 to 0.9 oz). The breeding male has bright white underparts with black flank streaks, brown upperparts, black face and throat bar, and a pink lower mandible. The female has a heavily streaked grey-brown back, and less intensely yellow underparts.
Range and habitat
Yellow-breasted Bunting aureola breeds in boreal forests of Finland to Bering Sea migrating to Indochina. Yellow-breasted Bunting ornata breeds from the Amur River to Manchuria, N Korea, Kamchatka and Kuril Islands. There are also ~4 records from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and a 2017 record from Labrador, Canada.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The yellow-breasted bunting breeds in open scrubby areas that consist of dry water rice fields for foraging and reedbeds for roosting, often near water, and is present in Siberia. It lays four to six eggs in a nest on the ground.
It is subject to heavy hunting pressure in China, through that most specimens pass during migration.
In crisis
Since 2004, it has been gradually upgraded to a status of Critically Endangered due to rapid drops in population sizes. Populations have declined precipitously since the early 2000s, and the species is now considered to be critically endangered.
Yellow-breasted Bunting is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Yellow-breasted Bunting, Wikidata item Q335535. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
