Cetti's Warbler

About the Cetti's Warbler

Cetti's warbler (Cettia cetti) is a small, brown warbler in the family Cettiidae, which breeds in southern and western Europe, northwest Africa and the east Palearctic as far as Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. The sexes are alike. The bird is named after the 18th-century Italian zoologist, Francesco Cetti. This species is often difficult to see because of its skulking habits.

Cetti's warbler was described in 1820 by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck from specimens collected by Alberto della Marmora in Sardinia. Temminck coined the binomial name Sylvia cetti. The specific epithet was chosen to commemorate the Italian zoologist Francesco Cetti. Cetti's warbler is now placed in the genus Cettia that was erected in 1834 by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon, with Cetti's warbler as the type species.

The phylogenetic relationships among the Cettia species are shown below, based on the data by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Three subspecies are recognised: C. c. cetti (Temminck, 1820) – west Europe to Greece and the Balkans, northwest Africa

C. c. orientalis Tristram, 1867 – Turkey to Iran and Afghanistan C. c. albiventris... Wikipedia →