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Ortolan Buntings are medium-sized buntings. Their plumage is highly cryptic, and dimorphic, i.e. males and females are slightly different. Male Ortolan Buntings have a greenish-grey head, neck and chest, a yellow throat and a yellow "moustache" of two curved stripes by the side of the throat. The rest of the front is lightly scalloped orange-brown, while the back is tawny-brown, with heavy dark-grey streaking. The tail is dark-grey. Female Ortolan Buntings have roughly the same overall pattern as males, but in duller colours, and with dark-grey streaking on the front and head. Both sexes have inconspicuous yellowish eye-rings. The bill is brownish, with a tiny dark tip (in females also a dark upper edge ["culmen"]). The irises are dark-brown; the legs and feet are greyish-pink. First-winter males resemble females.

The overall distribution of this species can be assessed, and specific locations where birds have been spotted can be found, based on individual sighting reports submitted by birdwatchers to ebird.org .

The global distribution of the Ortolan Bunting is available HERE .

Ortolan Buntings are a strongly migratory species that spends the northern winters in tropical Africa, the Mediterranean East coast and northern Arabia. During the breeding season they can be found in many parts of Europe, in Asia Minor and in central western Asia.

In Europe Ortolan Buntings are found only as breeding migrants. They populate most of the northern Mediterranean, i.e. parts of northern Iberia, southern France, northern Italy and the entire region around the Alps and South-east Europe, including the Balkans and all of Greece eastwards around the Black Sea and to the Caucasus mountain range and the Caspian Sea. In addition, while absent from the upper Danube valley, they are found in basically all of eastern Europe up to about 55 degrees geographic latitude and, in addition, basically all around the (near-)coastal fringe of the Baltic Sea (including southern Scandinavia, but not southern Sweden or Denmark). During their migration they can be found anywhere in the rest of continental Europe southward of the northern limit of their breeding range. In general, their distribution even within their known breeding range tends to be very patchy.

During the breeding season Ortolan Buntings have a preference for open country with scattered trees, be it pastures with trees, agricultural areas with fringe growth, isolated copses or very open woodland with grassy undergrowth.

S. Cuturilov reports spotting Ortolan Buntings near Krivi Vir, Eastern Serbia, in May 2016. Others were found by A. Sarok south of Belgrade, Serbia, in the timeframe 2010-2024.