Eurasian hoopoe

A hoopoe pokes its long beak into the ground.

It pulls out insects and grubs to eat.

A hoopoe walks over the ground and pushes its long beak into the soil to find food. It eats almost only small animals, mostly large insects and their young, such as grubs.

Crickets and grasshoppers are favorite prey. Sometimes a hoopoe also catches worms or small lizards. A Swiss nature park says fertilizers and pesticides on farmland harm the wildlife there.

The IUCN assessment says the hoopoe feeds almost entirely on animal matter, primarily large insects and their larvae and pupae (Snow and Perrins 1998), and that food quality and accessibility affect breeding success (Martin-Vivaldi et al. 1999; Fournier and Arlettaz 2001). The BTO names grasshoppers, crickets and small lizards as favored prey in the core range.

The Pfyn-Finges Nature Park lists larvae and large insects such as crickets, sometimes worms and small lizards, caught by searching the ground with the long bill, and says fertilizers and pesticides in the cultivated land it uses directly harm biodiversity.

Many hoopoes fly to Africa for the winter.

Some get lost and land in England in spring.

Hoopoes from the north of their range migrate. In one Swiss nature park, for example, hoopoes are seen from March to September and usually spend the winter in Africa. In other places, some or all of the hoopoes stay all year.

Each spring, as many as 100 hoopoes can turn up in the United Kingdom. They are birds flying north from Africa that overshoot and land on the south coast of England. A pair has nested in Britain only now and then.

The IUCN describes northern populations as fully migratory and others as partially migratory or sedentary. The Pfyn-Finges Nature Park says its birds usually winter in Africa and are present in the park's region from March to September, and reports more winter sightings around the Mediterranean, which it links to climate change.

The RSPB says up to 100 birds reach the UK in spring, mostly alone, as northbound migrants overshoot onto the south coast of England. The BTO calls the hoopoe an occasional breeder in the UK: four pairs bred in southern England in 1977 and the last confirmed breeding was a pair in Wales in 1996. Its first documented British record is from Greater London in 1666.

Listen to the sound at the start of this page.

It is a real hoopoe calling in Russia.

At the start of this page you can play a real recording of a hoopoe's call. Vladimir Arkhipov recorded it on 28 April 2004 in the delta of the Volga River, in the Astrakhan region of Russia, where the IUCN lists hoopoes as breeding birds.

Listen to the call, then talk about what it sounds like to you.

The recording on this page (Wikimedia Commons file "Upupa epops.ogg") was made by Vladimir Yu. Arkhipov on 28 April 2004 in the Volga delta, Astrakhan Oblast, Russia, and is described simply as the call of a hoopoe. Russia is among the breeding countries in the IUCN assessment, which lists the species in European, Central Asian and Eastern Asian Russia.

The file is shared under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

There are millions of hoopoes.

They need big insects and holes to nest in. Nest boxes can help them.

The hoopoe is listed as least concern, with about 5 to 10 million birds, but its numbers are going down. People hunt hoopoes in some places, and modern farming can leave too few big insects and nesting holes.

Nest boxes have helped. In Switzerland, hoopoes almost disappeared in the second half of the 20th century, but nest boxes later helped their numbers grow again.

BirdLife International assessed Upupa epops as Least Concern for the IUCN Red List (assessed 14 August 2020, published 2020): an extremely large range and population, about 5 to 10 million individuals (Krištín and Kirwan 2015), and a decreasing trend not rapid enough to approach the Vulnerable thresholds. The generation length is 2.8 years. The IUCN lists hunting in the Mediterranean region, Kuwait and parts of Southeast Asia, possible declines from hunting and disturbance in the northern Malay Peninsula, and food and nest-cavity losses after agricultural intensification; it calls for controls on hunting.

In Switzerland, the Pfyn-Finges Nature Park writes that the species nearly vanished in the second half of the 20th century, that nest boxes helped numbers recover, and, on its page for a 2022 Bird of the Park project, gives an estimate of 180 to 260 pairs, still Vulnerable on the national red list.