Eurasian blackcap

The Eurasian blackcap is a common and widespread typical warbler. It has mainly olive-grey upperparts and pale grey underparts. Both sexes have a neat coloured cap to the head, black in the male and reddish-brown in the female. The male’s typical song is a rich musical warbling.

About Eurasian blackcap in brief

The Eurasian blackcap is a common and widespread typical warbler. It has mainly olive-grey upperparts and pale grey underparts, and differences between the five subspecies are small. Both sexes have a neat coloured cap to the head, black in the male and reddish-brown in the female. The male’s typical song is a rich musical warbling, often ending in a loud high-pitched crescendo. The blackcap’s closest relative is the garden warbler, which looks quite different but has a similar song. It breeds in much of Europe, western Asia and northwestern Africa, and its preferred habitat is mature deciduous woodland. Despite extensive hunting in Mediterranean countries and the natural hazards of predation and disease, the blackcap has been extending its range for several decades. It is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as least concern. In Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise, the saint is represented by themes based on the black cap’s song. About 2% of blackcaps on Madeira are melanistic, with black plumage on the head and upper breast. This has also been recorded on the Canary Islands, but not from Cape Verde. The melanistic birds were sometimes considered to be a distinct subspecies, S obscura, a blackcap obscura. The nominate subspecies is about 13 cm long with a 7–8cm long wing span.

It can typically be 16–25 cm in length, but can be up to 16–20 cm wide. The nest is a neat cup, built low in brambles or scrub, and the clutch is typically 4–6 mainly buff eggs, which hatch in about 11 days. The chicks fledge in 11–12 days, but are cared for by both adults for some time after leaving the nest. Birds from the colder areas of its range winter in northwestern Europe, around the Mediterranean and in tropical Africa. Some German birds have adapted to spending the winter in gardens in Great Britain and Ireland. Insects are the main food in the breeding season, but, for the rest of the year, blackcaps survive primarily on small fruit. Garden birds also eat bread, fat and peanuts in winter. The genus Sylvia, the typical warblers, forms part of a large family of Old World warbirds, the Sylviidae. It was originally described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae, as Motacilla atricapilla. The current genus name is from Modern Latin silvia, a woodland sprite, related to silva, a wood. The species name, like the English name, refers to the male’s black cap. Atricapillas is from the Latin ater, \”black\”, and capillus, \”hair \”. The oldest, dated to 1.0 million years ago, are from the Early Pleistocene of Bulgaria.

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