Eurasian penduline-tit | Remiz pendulinus

Voice

The call is the most useful field mark of all: a high, thin, drawn-out and slightly descending tseeeoo, as fine as a whistle and easily lost among Reed and sedge warblers. Often you hear it only as the bird passes overhead. There is also a short tsee-tsee in contact and a soft, hissing little song from the male at the nest. Most vocal from late March to June, and again on passage in September and October.

Identification

Tiny and finely built, with a short, awl-shaped bill and a proportionally long tail. The adult male has a pale grey head with a broad, jet-black mask running through the eye to behind the cheek, a chestnut mantle and pale sandy underparts. The female's mask is narrower and browner-black and the mantle duller. Juveniles lack the mask entirely and are plain sandy brown with a pale head — a genuine pitfall in July and August. The nest is a field mark in itself: a grey, felted, pear-shaped bag of fifteen to twenty centimetres with a short entrance spout at one side, slung from a willow, poplar or tamarisk over water.

Confusion species

Little. Size and behaviour suggest bearded reedling, but that has a long narrow tail, an orange-brown body and, in the male, a grey head with a drooping black moustache rather than a mask. Red-backed shrike also has a black eye mask, but is three times the size and sits on scrub lookouts. Maskless juvenile Penduline Tits can look like a washed-out small warbler; then note the awl-shaped bill, the sandy tone and the way the bird hangs upside down from a reed head like a tit.

Habitat

Reed fringes, willow scrub and young poplars along rivers, oxbows, clay pits, lakes and canals; always where reed and soft, downy trees stand together. The male starts several nests at once to attract different females; the breeding system is loose and either parent may desert the clutch. Feeds on insects, and later in the year on reed seed and willow down.

Range and movements

Central, eastern and southern Europe, with a distribution that follows the great river valleys, east into Turkey and the Caucasus. At the north-western edge, in the Low Countries, it settled in the 1980s, peaked in the 1990s and has since fallen away sharply. In the Mediterranean it is ordinary: it breeds in the willow and reed zones of the Ebro and other big rivers and winters in numbers in the reedbeds of the Spanish east coast, the rice fields and the Guadalquivir marismas, and further afield in Italy and the Levant.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

Walk a reed fringe with willows along a river, oxbow or clay pit in April and May and listen for the thin tseeeoo over the reeds. Then scan the slender overhanging willow twigs above water for the grey purse: an abandoned nest from a previous year can hang on for months and betray the place. In the Mediterranean a winter reedbed in the Ebro delta or Doñana is far more productive.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened and numerous in southern and eastern Europe, but in retreat at the north-western edge of the range. In the Netherlands it has all but vanished as a breeding bird after a brief flowering, without anyone being sure why; rank and drying reed fringes, the loss of young willow growth and conditions in the wintering areas are all cited. Belgium and Germany show much the same picture.

Scientific name

Remiz pendulinus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Motacilla pendulinus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Remiz was introduced in 1819 by Jarocki. Remiz is the Polish word remiz for the penduline tit. pendulinus is Latin for 'hanging', from pendulus, after the purse-shaped nest suspended from a branch. The specimen the first description was based on came from Poland.