Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella)
Key Details
| Taxonomic Groups: | Vertebrate > bird > Bird |
| Red List Status: | Least Concern (Breeding) [LC(br)] |
| D5 Status: | Included in the baseline Red List Index for England (Wilkins, Wilson & Brown, 2022) |
| Section 41 Status: | (not listed) |
| Taxa Included Synonym: | (none) |
| UKSI Recommended Name: | Emberiza citrinella |
| UKSI Recommended Authority: | Linnaeus, 1758 |
| UKSI Recommended Qualifier: | (none specified) |
| Red List Citation: | Stanbury et al., 2021 |
| Notes on taxonomy/listing: | (none) |
Criteria
| Question 1: | Does species need conservation or recovery in England? |
| Response: | Yes |
| Justification: | Long term significant decline Eng BBS (25 yr -34%, 10 yr -15%) |
| Question 2: | Does recovery/ conservation depend on species-specific actions? |
| Response: | Yes |
| Justification: | There is a need to understand why the species continues to decline in abundance despite the provision of large quanitities of potentially suitable habitat/resources (eg field margins, winter foraging habitats and supplementary food) being made available on farmland through AE schemes deployment. |
| Question 3: | At a landscape scale, would the species benefit from untargeted habitat management to increase habitat mosaics, structural diversity, or particular successional stages? |
| Response: | N/A |
| Justification: | Yellowhammer will benefit from the creation of intimate grass-scrub habitat mosaics in lowland and upland fringe areas, especially where these abut areas of sympathetically-managed arable and mixed farmland. |
Species Assessment
| Current step on the Species Recovery Curve (SRC): | 6. Recovery solutions trialled |
| Recovery potential/expectation: | Medium-high |
| National Monitoring Resource: | Structured - sufficient |
| Species Comments: | Species not responding to provision of potentially suitable habitat on farmland |
Key Actions
Key Action 1
Proposed Action: Undertake research to understand why yellowhammers are not responding to the provision of a large quantity of potentially suitable habitat as a result of AE scheme deployment on English farmland
Action targets: 7. Best approach adopted at appropriate scales
Action type: Scientific research
Duration: 2 years
Scale of Implementation: National
High priority sites: n/a
Comments: Needs a national-scale analysis of existing data plus a field study to investigate responses to habitat provision at around 30 sites (farms)
Acknowledgment:
Data used on this website are adapted from Threatened species recovery actions 2025 baseline (JP065): Technical report and spreadsheet user guide (Natural England, 2025). Available here.