Warbler wobbles
I was hoping that you could take a look at a couple of photos I took of a warbler at Lackford Lakes in Suffolk, in the August of 2014. I originally thought that they might be fledgling Wood Warblers, as
I had seen an adult Wood Warbler a little earlier. Your help would be very much appreciated, as
I do have trouble with some of the warblers.
Dave Knowles, Norfolk
Q
We think your photos show a juvenile Chiffchaff, Dave. Juvenile Chiffchaffs, in late summer into autumn, have a ‘scruffy’ appearance which is generally lacking in the very similar Willow Warbler (where the juveniles usually are ‘neat’ and strongly coloured with yellow) and generally ‘cleanerlooking’ Wood Warblers. The eye-ring and barely distinct supercilium ( pale ‘eyebrow) and the dark legs and feet are also good pro-Chiffchaff features, shown in the photographs. If you could see the wings, they would look relatively short, as well (the primary projection is notably longer on Willow and particularly Wood Warblers)
A
David Hale, Wickford, Essex
Hello, David, we freely admit to not being hardcore taxonomists on Bird Watching! In the chat stats box, we were using the word ‘chat’ in the loose sense of one of the small thrush-like birds. Back when some of us started birdwatching in the 1970s, the fieldguides we were brought up with used to put the warblers, flycatchers, thrushes and chats in a grand family of birds called the Muscicapidae (or Old World Flycatchers aka ‘primitive insect eaters’), with many subfamilies. In time, refinement, most notably through DNA analysis, led some
A
authorities to split many of the subfamilies as families in themselves. These days, authorities such as the International Ornithological Union recognise the Muscicapidae as including the