A bird of woodland edges, fields, riverbanks and other partly open habitats. It forages in grass and sings from exposed treetops.
The belly is brown and the face has contrasting white and dark markings. Areas that are black in males are brown in females.
In a breeding-season study at Shinodayama, Osaka, nearby Meadow Buntings shared similar syllables, while the first syllable of a song tended to differ by individual. Akashi and Yamagishi observed birds throughout the day from April to June 1980, recording and analyzing their songs. Each bird had an average of 16.1 song types. A song type lasted 0.9–1.4 seconds and contained 6.4–9.6 syllables.
Males also changed their singing with the breeding stage. Unpaired males sang more often than paired males. Paired males sang actively throughout the day during incubation but only in the morning while feeding nestlings. The singing areas of individual birds did not overlap, and birds tended not to repeat the same song type. Two hours of morning observation were enough to record one bird’s full repertoire. These are observations from one Osaka site during the breeding season.
IUCN Red List (BirdLife International; status reported by Choi et al. 2020) · Least Concern (LC) · Global
Choi and colleagues’ 2020 paper reports the IUCN global status as Least Concern (LC), with a stable population trend as of March 2020. In the Korean nationwide survey data they analyzed for 1997–2012, the probability of recording a Meadow Bunting decreased by an estimated 2.99% per year.