Linnet

About the Linnet

The common linnet or Eurasian linnet (Linaria cannabina) is a small passerine bird of the finch family, Fringillidae. It derives its common name and the scientific name, Linaria, from its fondness for hemp seeds and flax seeds—flax being the English name of the plant from which linen is made.

In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus included the common linnet in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name, Acanthis cannabina. The species was formerly placed in the genus Carduelis but based on the results of a phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences published in 2012, it was moved to the genus Linaria that had been introduced by the German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein in 1802.

The genus name linaria is the Latin for a linen-weaver, from linum, "flax". The species name cannabina comes from the Latin for hemp. The English name has a similar root, being derived from Old French linette, from lin, "flax".

There are seven recognised subspecies: L. c. autochthona (Clancey, 1946) – Scotland L. c. cannabina (Linnaeus, 1758) – western, central and northern Europe, western and central Siberia. Non-breeding in north Africa... Wikipedia →