Great Reed-Warbler

About the Great Reed-Warbler

The great reed warbler (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) is an insectivorous bird in the family Acrocephalidae. It is a medium-sized passerine bird and the largest of the warblers. It breeds throughout mainland Europe and the Western Palearctic and migrates to sub-Saharan Africa in the winter. It favours reed beds during the breeding season, while living in reed beds, bush thickets, rice fields, and forest clearings during the winter. It exhibits relatively low sexual dimorphism, and the sexes are similar in appearance. This species mates both polygynously and monogamously.

The great reed warbler was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus arundinaceus. He specified the type locality as Northern Europe. Linnaeus based his entry on the Turdus musicus palustris or Bruch Beiden Rohr Drossel that had been described in 1750 by the German naturalist Jacob Theodor Klein in his book Historiae avium prodromus. The specific epithet arundinaceus is Latin meaning "like a reed" (hence "of the reeds"), from arundo, arundinis meaning... Wikipedia →