Eurasian Hoopoe

The Eurasian Hoopoe, often simply called the Common Hoopoe, is one of the most instantly recognizable birds in the Old World. Nothing else combines its warm pinkish-cinnamon body, boldly barred black-and-white wings and tail, long down-curved bill, and spectacular fan-shaped crest that snaps open like a headdress when the bird is excited or alarmed. In flight it looks almost like a giant butterfly, flopping along on broad, rounded wings that flash black and white with every beat. It is so distinctive that it sits alone in its own family, the Upupidae.

Widespread across Europe, Asia, and Africa, the hoopoe is a bird of open, sunny country. It spends much of its day walking across lawns, pastures, and bare ground, probing the soil with that curved bill for grubs, crickets, and beetles. Its soft, far-carrying oop-oop-oop call gives the bird its name in dozens of languages, and few birds carry so much cultural weight: the hoopoe appears in ancient Egyptian art, Greek myth, the Quran, and Persian poetry, and it is the national bird of Israel. For travelers from the Americas, spotting a hoopoe strutting across a Mediterranean olive grove is often a trip highlight.

There is genuinely almost nothing to confuse a hoopoe with. It is a jay-sized bird with a pinkish-cinnamon head and body, a long thin decurved bill, and a crest of cinnamon feathers tipped in black that can lie flat along the crown or flare into a dramatic fan. The wings and tail are barred boldly in black and white, a pattern that is striking at rest and downright dazzling in the bird's slow, undulating, moth-like flight. On the ground it walks and runs rather than hops, pausing to drive its bill into soft earth. If you see one land, watch the crest: hoopoes almost always fan it briefly the moment they touch down.

Male vs. female

Male and female hoopoes look very similar, and most field guides treat them as effectively identical at a distance. With a close view, females tend to be slightly smaller and a touch duller, with the pinkish tones of the head and breast a little grayer or more washed out than the male's warm cinnamon. Some females show faint dusky streaking on the lower breast that males typically lack. Behavior is often a better clue in spring: it is the male that delivers the persistent oop-oop-oop song from a perch, often with the throat visibly inflating on each note, while courtship feeding, in which the male passes a fat grub to the female, marks a pair clearly.

Juveniles

Juvenile hoopoes look like slightly scruffy, faded versions of their parents. The body plumage is duller and grayer, the crest is noticeably shorter, and the bill is shorter and straighter than an adult's, only gaining its full elegant curve as the bird matures. The black-and-white wing barring is present from the start, so even a young hoopoe is unmistakable. Freshly fledged birds often sit quietly in cover, giving thin hissing begging calls, and family groups may forage together on open ground for a few weeks after fledging before the young disperse.

The hoopoe's song is one of the signature sounds of warm Old World countryside in spring: a soft, hollow, far-carrying oop-oop-oop, usually delivered in groups of three, sometimes two or four, repeated steadily for minutes at a time. The quality is low and rounded, almost like someone blowing gently across the top of a bottle, and it carries a surprising distance for such a quiet-sounding note. The bird's name in English, in its scientific name Upupa epops, and in many other languages is a direct imitation of this call.

It can be confused at long range with certain doves or with the Common Cuckoo, but the hoopoe's notes are all on one pitch and typically come in threes, whereas the cuckoo gives two notes that fall in pitch. Away from the song, hoopoes give harsh, dry rasping and churring calls in alarm, and nestlings hiss like snakes when the cavity is disturbed, an effect thought to startle predators.

The hoopoe has one of the broadest ranges of any land bird, breeding from Portugal and Morocco east across southern and central Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia to China, and throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa (where the resident birds are sometimes split as the African Hoopoe) as well as Madagascar. In Europe it is common around the Mediterranean, in Iberia, southern France, Italy, and the Balkans, and it has been recolonizing parts of central Europe; in Britain it is only a scarce but regular spring overshoot migrant that occasionally stays to breed.

Northern and central Asian breeders are strongly migratory, wintering in Africa south of the Sahara and across the Indian subcontinent, while birds in Africa, southern Spain, and much of South Asia are resident year-round. Look for hoopoes in open and semi-open country with short grass or bare soil for foraging and old trees or walls for nesting: farmland, pastures, orchards, vineyards, olive groves, steppe, savanna, large gardens, and open woodland edges. They avoid dense forest and wet, heavily vegetated ground.

Hoopoes are ground-feeding insect specialists. The bulk of the diet is large soil-dwelling invertebrates: beetle larvae, crickets, grasshoppers, and especially mole-crickets, which are a favorite prey almost everywhere the two occur together. They also take caterpillars, ants, spiders, earthworms, and occasionally small lizards, frogs, and a few seeds. Because they eat so many pest larvae, hoopoes are welcomed by farmers across much of their range, and in some regions their fortunes track the abundance of big insects in traditionally farmed landscapes.

The feeding style is distinctive. A hoopoe walks steadily across short grass or bare earth, drives the long bill into the soil or a dung pile, and levers it open to grip a grub. Large or armored prey is beaten against the ground or a stone to kill it and knock off legs and wing cases, then tossed up and caught in the open bill, since the tongue is too short to swallow food from the bill tip.

Hoopoes are cavity nesters but do not excavate their own holes. They use existing cavities in old trees, stone walls, buildings, earth banks, rock crevices, and, increasingly in parts of Europe, nest boxes put up for them in orchards and vineyards. The entrance is often surprisingly small, and little or no nest material is added beyond a few scraps. The female lays roughly five to eight eggs (sometimes more in the north) and does almost all the incubating, for about 15 to 18 days, while the male brings her food.

The hoopoe nest is famous for being one of the smelliest in the bird world, and the smell is a weapon. The incubating female and the nestlings produce a foul, musty secretion from the preen gland, rich in bacteria that are thought to protect eggs and chicks from infection while making the brood distinctly unappetizing. Older nestlings add to the defense by hissing, jabbing with the bill, and squirting droppings at intruders. Chicks fledge after roughly four weeks and are fed by both parents. Pairs raise one brood in most of the range, with two broods regular in warmer southern regions.

For readers in the Americas, the hoopoe is a bird you travel to see rather than attract, since it occurs only in Europe, Asia, and Africa (vagrants have reached Alaska only a handful of times). Fortunately it is common, conspicuous, and easy to find in the right places. Here is where and how to look.

• Visit the Mediterranean basin in spring or summer: Spain, Portugal, southern France, Italy, and Greece all hold good numbers in farmland, olive groves, and vineyards from roughly March to September.
• Scan short grass and bare ground: hotel lawns, golf courses, campsites, pastures, and dirt tracks are classic hoopoe foraging spots, so check open ground before woods.
• In Africa and India hoopoes are present year-round; parks, gardens, and savanna reserves from Morocco to South Africa and across the Indian subcontinent are reliable.
• Listen at dawn in spring for the soft, tripled oop-oop-oop; the song carries far and is usually the easiest way to locate a territorial male.
• Watch for the butterfly-like flight: the flashing black-and-white wings catch the eye at long range, often before the bird lands and vanishes against bare earth.
• In Britain and northern Europe, check spring overshoot reports (April-May) on coastal headlands; single birds often linger for days on lawns and short turf.

• African Hoopoe: A close relative of the far south, richer rufous below with less white in the crest tips
• Wryneck: A cryptic brown woodpecker relative that shares open habitats but lacks the crest and bold wing pattern