A very small woodland bird with a yellow crown stripe.
It has an olive-green body, pale eye surroundings, white wing bars and a yellow crown stripe.
At two bird-ringing stations on Poland’s southern Baltic coast, researchers tracked autumn migrants from 1976 to 2024. Goldcrest captures showed a long-term decline beginning in the 1980s, while the timing of autumn migration changed very little across the 42-year record.
At the same stations, captures of the related Firecrest increased after 2000. These records show that the two small forest birds changed differently in number even as they passed the same coast during autumn migration. The stations recorded autumn passage by mist-netting and ringing birds from 14 August to 1 November each year. They were about 200 km apart.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment
The 2018 global IUCN Red List assessment lists the Goldcrest as Least Concern (LC), with a decreasing population trend and an estimated 98–165 million mature individuals. The assessment cites the species’ very large range and population when explaining why its decline does not reach a threatened category threshold.