Nuthatches are compact birds with short legs, compressed wings, and square 12-feathered tails. They have long, sturdy, pointed bills and strong toes with long claws. Nuthatches have blue-grey backs (violet-blue in some Asian species, which also have red or yellow bills) and white underparts, which are variably tinted with buff, orange, rufous or lilac. Although head markings vary between species, a long black eye stripe, with contrasting white supercilium, dark forehead and blackish cap is common. The sexes look similar, but may differ in underpart colouration, especially on the rear flanks and under the tail. Juveniles and first-year birds can be almost indistinguishable from adults.
Individuals from the nuthatch family live in the vast majority of North America and Europe and all through Asia down to the Wallace Line. Nuthatches are meagerly spoken to in Africa; one species lives in a little range of northeastern Algeria and a populace of the Eurasian nuthatch subspecies, S. e. hispaniensis, lives in the mountains of Morocco. Most species are occupant year-round. The main noteworthy vagrant is the red-breasted nuthatch, which winters broadly crosswise over North America, abandoning the northernmost parts of its rearing range in Canada; it has been recorded as a vagrant in Bermuda, Iceland and England. Most nuthatches are forest fowls and the greater part are found in coniferous or other evergreen timberlands, albeit every species has an inclination for a specific tree sort. The quality of the affiliation fluctuates from the Corsican nuthatch, which is nearly connected with Corsican pine, to the catholic living space of the Eurasian nuthatch, which favors deciduous or blended woods however breeds in coniferous timberlands in the north of its far reaching extent. Notwithstanding, the two types of rock nuthatches are not firmly attached to forests: they breed on rough slants or bluffs, albeit both move into lush regions when not reproducing. In parts of Asia where a few animal groups happen in the same geographic locale, there is frequently an altitudinal division in their favored territories.
