White-winged Black Tit

About the White-winged Black Tit

The white-winged black tit (Melaniparus leucomelas) is a passerine bird in the tit family Paridae. It is also known as the white-winged tit, dark-eyed black tit or northern black tit. The species was first described by Eduard Rüppell in 1840.

It is mainly black with a white wing patch, but differs from the more northern white-shouldered tit (Melaniparus guineensis) with which it sometimes considered conspecific in that it has a dark eye. It is found in central Africa, from Angola in the west to Ethiopia in the east. There are two races:

M. l. leucomelas Rüppell, 1840 – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan M. l. insignis Cabanis, 1880 – African equator to southern subtropics The white-winged black tit was formerly one of the many species in the genus Parus but was moved to Melaniparus after a molecular phylogenetic analysis published in 2013 showed that the members of the new genus formed a distinct clade.

Gill, Frank B.; Slikas, Beth; Sheldon, Frederick H. (2005). "Phylogeny of titmice (Paridae): II. Species relationships based on sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene". Auk. 122 (1): 121–143. doi... Wikipedia →