Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A small brownish Old World songbird (Saxicola rubetra) often found in open country.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An oscine passerine bird of the genus Pratincola, P. rubetra, closely related to the stonechat, and less nearly to the wheatear. Compare cuts under stonechat and wheatear. This is one of the bushchats, specified as the whin-bushchat. It is also called
grasschat and furzechat, and shares the name stonechat with its congener P. rubicola. It is a common British bird, whose range includes nearly the whole of Europe, much of Africa, and a little of western Asia. The whinchat is 5¼ inches long and 9¼ in extent; the upper parts are variegated with blackish-brown shaft-spots and yellowish-brown edgings of the feathers, lightest on the rump; the under parts are uniform rich rnfous; a long superciliary stripe, a streak below the eye and blackish auriculars, a patch on the wing, and the concealed bases of the tail-feathers are white or whitish; the eyes are brown, and the bill and feet black. The whinchat haunts lowland pastures as well as upland wastes, nests on the ground, and lays four to six greenish-blue eggs, with faint reddish-brown spots usually zoned about the larger end; it is an expert flycatcher, and also feeds largely on the destructive wire-worm. During May and June the male has a melodious song. The whinchat has an Oriental representative, P. macrorhyncha of India, and several other species are described.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Zoöl.) A small warbler (Pratincola rubetra) common in Europe; -- called also
whinchacker ,whincheck ,whin-clocharet .
WordNet 3.0
- n. brown-and-buff European songbird of grassy meadows
Examples
“A teenage twitcher and a small buff-coloured songbird called the whinchat were the keys that turned the Iron Curtain's landscape of barbed wire, mined death strips and Kalashnikov-toting border guards into what is probably the most enduring green success story in Europe since the Cold War.”
“To my delight, when I visited I discovered several wheatears, along with another passage migrant, the whinchat, all feeding to build up their fat reserves before undertaking the epic journey south to Africa.”
“Some greenfinches, a whinchat or two, almost no pipits or larks, and very few sparrows.”
“They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters -- the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others.”
“The Rev.W. H. H.rbert made similar observations, and states that the young whinchat and wheatear, which have naturally little variety of song, are ready in confinement to learn from other species, and become much better songsters.”
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection A Series of Essays
“Over the same period numbers of cuckoos, nightingales, wood warbler, whinchat, yellow wagtail and pied flycatcher also more than halved.”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“How the wheatear and whinchat support themselves in winter cannot be so easily ascertained, since they spend their time on wild heaths and warrens; the former especially, where there are stone quarries: most probably it is that their maintenance arises from the aureliae of the”
“The trap was full of birds, some fifty or sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel, beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they had been trapped, and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken and the eyes were already dim.”
Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Selected from the Works of Ouida
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘whinchat’.
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birds
birds with singular names from
at least 9 English dictionariesaasvogel, aberdevine, accentor, accipiter, aepyornis, agami, albatross, alcatras, alcid, alcidine, amadavat, amokura and 1056 more...
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1800 Woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and Hi...
Bizarre stuff found there. Note that archaic terms are occasionally not spelled the way we spell them today; in these cases I've tried to link to the modernized spelling (where known) on the word p...
musk-bull, urus, zebu, cameleopard, ratel, suricate, wombach, saragoy, murine, ternate, coach dog, comforter and 91 more...
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Flightful Forays
trips from El Nido
vireo, tanager, scaup, lark, killdear, falcon, cormorant, becard, avocet, accipiter, peregrine, remex and 135 more...
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Still More Bird Wirds
A work in progress....Birds from around the world (other than endemic to North America).
barbet, hornbill, trogon, bee-eater, bristlehead, wren-babbler, stubtail, blackeye, bush warbler, cassowary, bowerbird, bird-of-paradise and 723 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for whinchat.
reesetee Thanks, c_b! Aug 26, 2008
chained_bear Image can be found here. (Attention reesetee... lots of old woodcuts of birds on that URL...) Aug 25, 2008