31 birds containing the letter H — each with origin, classification, and notes.
Below are birds that contain the letter H anywhere in the name. Each of the 31 birds below opens to a full profile.
Britain's second most common bird and one of Europe's most abundant — the male in spring is a strikingly handsome bird with a pink-red breast, slate-blue head, and bold white wing bars; males sing a loud, rattling song ending in a distinctive flourish that varies in dialect between regions.
A small, fearless North American songbird with distinctive black cap and bib — beloved feeder birds known for sophisticated alarm calls that encode information about predator size and danger level.
The most numerous bird on Earth — over 30 billion at any given time — domesticated from the Southeast Asian red junglefowl about 8,000 years ago and now central to every poultry-eating cuisine on Earth.
A small, seed-eating songbird with a thick conical beak — including the Galapagos finches that helped Darwin develop natural selection theory, the canaries of pet history, and many beloved garden visitors.
A brilliantly coloured small finch with a crimson face, black and white head, and gleaming yellow wingbars — a specialist seed-eater that uses its narrow bill to extract seeds from thistles and teasels; one of Britain's most beloved garden birds.
A bold, predatory songbird that behaves like a miniature raptor — the great grey shrike is pale grey, black and white, perching prominently on the tops of bushes and lone trees, scanning for prey; famous for impaling prey on thorns to create a larder, it is a scarce winter visitor to Britain, with individual birds often returning to the same heathland site for multiple winters.
Britain's most powerful-billed finch — the hawfinch has a massive, pale bill capable of cracking cherry stones and olive pits that require 50–70 kg of force to split; a bulky, short-tailed finch with rich chestnut, black, and white plumage and a distinctive white wing bar; notoriously shy and elusive, spending most of its time in high tree canopy and often detected only by its sharp call.
A general name for medium-sized day-flying raptors — including the Cooper's, sharp-shinned, and red-tailed hawks of North America — built for speed in forest pursuit and for soaring on thermals.
A long-legged wading bird that stands motionless in shallow water, then strikes with neck-spear precision — the great blue heron a familiar sight at North American wetlands.
A dashing, long-winged falcon — sleek and swift, with the silhouette of a large swift, the hobby is one of Britain's most aerial predators, specialising in catching dragonflies and swallows in flight at speed; adults have slate-grey upperparts, heavily streaked underparts, and vivid rusty-red thighs and undertail; a summer visitor from Africa, arriving in late spring when dragonflies emerge.
A cinnamon-orange bird with a dramatic black-tipped crown that fans open into a bold crest — found across Africa, Europe, and Asia, the national bird of Israel, and known in many cultures as a messenger between the worlds.
A large tropical bird defined by its enormous brightly colored bill topped with a casque — a forest frugivore and icon of African and Asian biodiversity, and the subject of one of the most unusual nesting behaviors in the bird world.
A familiar summer visitor that builds its distinctive mud nest under the eaves of houses — arriving from southern Africa each April, house martins construct domed cup nests from hundreds of individual pellets of mud gathered from puddle edges; the white rump is the key identification feature separating it from the swallow.
The most common hummingbird in eastern North America, weighing less than a U.S. nickel, capable of hovering, flying backward, and migrating across the Gulf of Mexico nonstop.
A small, jewel-bright Eurasian fishing bird that hovers above water and dives at over 40 km/h to catch small fish, the inspiration for the bullet train's nose cone design.
Britain's largest harrier — a spectacular bird of prey of reedbeds and marshes, the male has a striking grey wing patch contrasting with russet body and black wingtips; it quartered over British reedbeds for centuries but was driven to extinction by hunting and egg collection, with only one pair breeding by 1971; a successful conservation recovery has produced over 600 pairs today.
A small, glossy-capped tit of ancient woodland — easily confused with the willow tit but distinguished by its glossier black cap, cleaner white cheeks, and distinctive 'pitchoo' call; like all tits, the marsh tit is an intelligent, acrobatic forager; it is a food-hoarder, storing thousands of individual seeds in bark crevices and leaf litter, and has an exceptional spatial memory for relocating them.
A small brown European migratory songbird famous for its powerful, varied, and beautifully complex song — featured in countless poems and songs across European literature.
A cryptically camouflaged nocturnal bird that rests motionless on the ground or along tree branches during the day, invisible against bark and leaf litter — famous for its churring mechanical song heard across heathlands at dusk.
A small, compact woodland bird that walks headfirst down tree trunks — the only bird capable of descending a vertical surface face-down, and a remarkably efficient hoarder of seeds and insects.
The world's largest living bird — flightless, two-toed, capable of running at 70 km/h, laying the largest eggs of any bird, and producing meat increasingly farmed across the globe.
A boldly pied coastal wader with a long, bright orange bill used as a hammer and lever to open bivalves — conspicuous, loud, and one of the most recognisable shorebirds of rocky coastlines worldwide.
A large game bird native to Asia — introduced to North America and Europe for hunting, with the iridescent ring-necked males and mottled-camouflage females being among the most familiar farmland birds in their introduced range.
The black-and-white summer visitor of ancient oak woods — the male pied flycatcher is crisply black above and white below with a bold white forehead patch; the female is brown and white; they arrive from West Africa in late April to breed in old oak trees and nest boxes, making sallying flights to catch insects and raising a brood before departing in late summer.
A compact, upright chat of heathland and coastal scrub — the male has a striking black head, white collar, and bright orange breast, and sits prominently on gorse or bramble stems making a harsh "wheet-tsak-tsak" call like two pebbles being knocked together; year-round resident on British heathland, it is one of the first birds to establish territories in January.
A diverse family of medium-sized songbirds known for melodious songs and ground-foraging — with the American robin, European blackbird, and song thrush as the most familiar members of a globally distributed family.
A migratory chat with a flash of white rump that arrives on British uplands each spring from sub-Saharan Africa — one of the earliest summer migrants, sometimes appearing in late February; the male has a grey back and black eye mask; it undertakes one of the most remarkable migrations of any small bird, with Greenland birds crossing the entire Atlantic non-stop.
A scratchy, energetic warbler of bramble scrub and overgrown hedgerows — the male has a white throat that puffs out during his jerky song-flight display, in which he rises a few metres into the air and parachutes back down singing; a common summer visitor that suffered a catastrophic population crash in 1969 due to Sahel drought.
A small, range-restricted hummingbird of southern Baja California with a brilliant green back and rufous belly — endemic to the peninsula and one of the few "X" birds in field guides.
A bright yellow European bunting whose distinctive song is often transcribed as "a little bit of bread and no cheeeese" — a familiar farmland bird in the British Isles, declining with the loss of mixed agriculture.
A small, social, vivid Australian songbird with zebra-striped tail feathers and orange cheek patches — a popular cage bird worldwide and the most-studied songbird in neuroscience laboratories.
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