Willow Tit

About the Willow Tit

The willow tit (Poecile montanus) is a passerine bird in the tit family, Paridae. It is a widespread and common resident breeder throughout temperate and subarctic Europe and across the Palearctic. The plumage is grey-brown and off-white with a black cap and bib. It is more of a conifer specialist than the closely related marsh tit, which explains its breeding much farther north. It is resident, and most birds do not migrate.

The willow tit was described in 1827 by the Swiss naturalist Thomas Conrad von Baldenstein under the trinomial name Parus cinereus montanus. The type locality is the mountain forests in the Canton of Grisons, Switzerland. The willow tit is now placed in the genus Poecile that was erected by the German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup in 1829. The genus name, Poecile, is the Ancient Greek name for a now unidentifiable small bird, and the specific montanus is Latin for "of the mountains".

Poecile was at one time treated as a subgenus within the genus Parus but molecular taxonomic analysis, using both nuclear and mitochondrial genes, supports Poecile as a distinct clade. Within Poecile, most of the Old World species (including the willow tit) form a separate... Wikipedia →