Linnet Call MP3s
Known for a light, twittering chatter and once one of Britain's most prized songbirds, the Linnet's call is a favourite for hedgerow and farmland identification.
Also known as
Recordings (4)
About this species
Around 13 cm in length, the Linnet (Linaria cannabina) is a passerine songbird: the breeding male glowing with a crimson breast and forehead over a grey head. It favours heath, commons, dunes and scrubby rough ground.
Flocks keep up a dry, musical twittering, especially in bounding flight. It feeds on the small seeds of weeds and wild flowers, often far from cover. It wanders in nomadic flocks, breeding loosely and following the seed crop. On migration it moves through Greece and the Mediterranean in great numbers, a familiar bird of field, wood and garden.
Legal use
The Linnet breeds widely across Europe, North Africa and parts of western Asia, and is a fully protected wild bird rather than a game species across that range, covered by the EU Birds Directive, the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act, and the Bern Convention. Its UK population fell roughly 50-70% from the late 1960s onward, largely due to agricultural intensification and loss of weed-seed food sources, and it has been Red-listed there since 1996. Once popular in the historical cage-bird trade, trapping of wild Linnets is now prohibited in the UK and EU outside narrow exceptions — including Malta, which has repeatedly (and unlawfully, per two EU Court of Justice rulings) included Linnet in its contested autumn finch-trapping derogation; consult our full country-by-country disclaimer for details relevant to your location.