Bearded Reedling redux

The Bearded Reedling used to be known as the Bearded Tit. The name change wasn’t down to some odd political stance. After all, the Great Tit, Blue Tit, Long-tailed Tit, and even the Penduline Tit are all still tits.

No, the rationale for the rename is that the Beardie is not a tit all. It may have some of the charactertistics of the Long-tailed Tit, well, basically a long tail, but those are purely superficial similarities. The Beardie doesn’t fit into the tit family.

The Beardie is not in any genus in which the proper tits sit. In fact, the Bearded Reedling, Panurus biarmicus, (sometimes known as the Bearded Parrotbill) is the only known extant species within the Panurus genus. There are likely to have been others in the past, but those are extinct, not extant.

The British Trust for Ornithology, BTO, says 695 breeding pairs in UK. RSPB website says 630, although it said that back in 2018 when I wrote about the species back then. I don’t think their data are updated often enough, estimates on counts have presumably changed in that time.