Gould remarked that pipits with wine-coloured breasts differing from the more common olive-coloured pipits were 'a sad puzzle to our ornithologists'. The bird in the foreground, in summer plumage, was found in 1864 at Worthing. Similar birds with wine-coloured breasts and younger birds, whose flanks were more spotted with brown, were seen in March, 1867, in 'a small salt-pool, just inside the sea-beach at Portslade, near Brighton'.

DISTRIBUTION: Breeds mountainous regions of Europe, southwest, central, and northeast Asia. Winters to lower altitudes some dispersing as far as southern England. The closely related and confusingly similar Rock Pipit breeds in Britain on rocky coasts and islands