The Long Song of the Garden Warbler (Day Thirteen)

As someone who cares slight-to-none about ever being a birdwatcher, today's featured article on Wikipedia expanded my breath of knowledge beyond that which I would not have migrated to on my own. (Hence, the benefit of this blog!)

The garden warbler (Sylvia borin) "is a widespread small bird that breeds in most of Europe. It is a plain, long-tailed typical warbler with black upperparts and dull black underparts; the sexes are similar and juveniles resemble the adults. Its two subspecies differ only slightly and inter-breed where their ranges overlap.... The garden warbler's rich melodic song is similar to that of the Blackcap, its closest relative, which competes with it for territory when nesting in the same woodland."

As well, "[t]he preferred breeding habitat in Eurasia is open woodland with dense, low cover for nesting; despite its name, gardens are rarely occupied by this small passerine bird.... The garden warbler is strongly migratory, wintering in sub-Saharan Africa." 

Even though one will not find me at a National Audubon Association meeting anytime soon, I am avid student of natural selection, biological or otherwise. So, here is my greatest takeaway from this article:

The genus Sylvia, the typical warblers, forms part of a large family of Old World warblers, the Sylviidae. Fossils from France show that the genus dates back at least 20 million years. The garden warbler and its nearest relative, the Blackcap, are an ancient species pair which diverged very early from the rest of the genus, between 12 and 16 million years ago. In the course of time, these two species have become sufficiently distinctive that they have been placed in separate subgenera, with the Blackcap in subgenus Sylvia and the garden warbler in Epilais.

And as a reminder of the blunt ignorance of the pre-Darwin world, Aristotle considered in his History of Animals "that the garden warbler eventually metamorphosed into a blackcap."

For an informative YouTube video on other differences between the Garden Warbler and the Blackcap, click here.