The chiffchaff is a migratory passerine which winters in southern and western Europe, southern Asia and north Africa. It is named onomatopoeically for its simple chiff-chaff song. The female builds a domed nest on or near the ground, and assumes most of the responsibility for brooding and feeding the chicks.
About Common chiffchaff in brief
The common chiffchaff is a migratory passerine which winters in southern and western Europe, southern Asia and north Africa. It is named onomatopoeically for its simple chiff-chaff song. The female builds a domed nest on or near the ground, and assumes most of the responsibility for brooding and feeding the chicks. A small insectivorous bird, it is subject to predation by mammals, such as cats and mustelids, and birds, particularly hawks of the genus Accipiter. It has three still commonly accepted subspecies, together with some from the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and the Caucasus which are now more often treated as full species. The binomial name is of Greek origin; Phylloscopus comes from phyllonphi, leaf, and skopeo, to look at, or to see. It was first formally described as Sylvia collybita by French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1817 in his Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle. The song is likened to the jingling of coins, and is also known as the Dutch tjiftjaf, the German Zilpzalp, Welsh siff-saff and Finnish tiltaltti.
The male weighs 7–8grammes, and the female 6–7grammes. The spring adult of the western nominate subspecies has brown-washed dull green upperparts, off-white underparts becoming yellowish on the flanks, and a short whitish supercilium. After moulting both the adult and the juvenile have brighter and greener upperparts and a paler supercilia. This is one of the first avian signs that spring has returned. Its call is a less disyllabic than the hooe hooet hweet, less hweet than the willow warbler or Bonelli’s warbler. This song is a shorter djup djup wheepich wheepichi, which differs from that of the Bonelli’s warbler, which has a shorter Djup djupp djupp wheepchichi, or wheep wheep hweet wheep chichichi. The chiff chaff has a distinctive repetitive song, a cheerful cheerful chiffChaff song, which can be heard in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. It can be found in open woodlands throughout northern and temperate Europe and the Palearctic.
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This page is based on the article Common chiffchaff published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
