Common linnet
Common linnet | |
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Male in breeding plumage | |
Female | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Passeriformes |
Family: | Fringillidae |
Subfamily: | Carduelinae |
Genus: | Linaria |
Species: | L. cannabina
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Binomial name | |
Linaria cannabina | |
Range of L. cannabina Breeding Resident Non-breeding
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Synonyms | |
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The common linnet (Linaria cannabina) is a small passerine bird of the finch family, Fringillidae. It derives its common name and the scientific name, Linaria, from its fondness for hemp seeds and flax seeds—flax being the English name of the plant from which linen is made.
Taxonomy
In 1758, the Swedish naturalist
The genus name linaria is the Latin for a linen-weaver, from linum, "flax". The species name cannabina comes from the Latin for hemp.[7] The English name has a similar root, being derived from Old French linette, from lin, "flax".[8]
There are seven recognised subspecies:[4]
- L. c. autochthona (Clancey, 1946) – Scotland
- L. c. cannabina (Linnaeus, 1758) – western, central and northern Europe, western and central Siberia. Non-breeding in north Africa and southwest Asia
- L. c. bella (Brehm, CL, 1845) – Middle East to Mongolia and northwestern China
- L. c. mediterranea (Tschusi, 1903) – Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece, northwest Africa and Mediterranean islands
- L. c. guentheri (Wolters, 1953) – Madeira
- L. c. meadewaldoi (Hartert, 1901) – western and central Canary Island (El Hierro and Gran Canaria)
- L. c. harterti (Bannerman, 1913) – eastern Canary Islands (Alegranza, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura)
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L. c. mediterranea, male
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L. c. mediterranea, female
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L. c. mediterranea, juvenile
Description
The common linnet is a slim bird with a long tail. The upper parts are brown, the throat is sullied white and the bill is grey. The summer male has a grey nape, red head-patch and red breast. Females and young birds lack the red and have white underparts, the breast streaked buff.
Distribution
The common linnet breeds in
Behaviour
Open land with thick bushes is favoured for breeding, including heathland and garden. It builds its nest in a bush, laying four to seven eggs.
This species can form large flocks outside the breeding season, sometimes mixed with other finches, such as twite, on coasts and salt marshes.
The common linnet's pleasant song contains fast trills and twitters.
It feeds on the ground, and low down in bushes, its food mainly consisting of seeds, which it also feeds to its chicks. It likes small to medium-sized seeds from most arable weeds,
Conservation
The common linnet is listed by the UK
In Britain, populations are declining, attributed to increasing use of herbicides, aggressive scrub removal and excessive hedge trimming; its population fell by 56% between 1968 and 1991, probably due to a decrease in seed supply and the increasing use of herbicide. From 1980 to 2009, according to the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme, the European population decreased by 62%[10]
Favourable management practices on agricultural land include:
- Set-aside
- Overwinter stubbles
- Uncultivated margins, ditches, field corners
- Conservation headlands
- Wild bird cover, using plants that produce small, oil-rich seeds, such as Brassica napus
- Restoration of meadows: restoration and creation of hay-meadows
- Short, thick, thorny hedgerows and scrub for nesting habitat
Cultural references
The bird was a popular pet in the late
The English Baroque composer John Blow composed an ode on the occasion of the death of his colleague Henry Purcell, "An Ode on the Death of Mr. Purcell" set to the poem "Mark how the lark and linnet sing" by the poet John Dryden.
"The Linnets" has become the nickname of
Robert Burns's 1788 poem "A Mother's Lament for the Death of Her Son" also tells of a linnet bird bewailing her ravished young.[11]
William Blake invokes "the linnet's song" in one of the poems entitled "Song" in his Poetical Sketches.[12]
Walter de la Mare's poem "The Linnet", published in 1918 in the collection Motley and Other Poems, has been set to music by a number of composers including Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Kenneth Leighton[13] and Jack Gibbons.[14]
The Eurovision Song Contest 2014 entry for the Netherlands "The Common Linnets" is a direct reference to the bird.
William Wordsworth argued that the song of the common linnet provides more wisdom than books in the third verse of "The Tables Turned":
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
But the fellow English poet Robert Bridges used the common linnet instead to express the limitations of poetry—concentrating on the difficulty in poetry of conveying the beauty of a bird's song. He wrote in the first verse:
I heard a linnet courting
His lady in the spring:
His mates were idly sporting,
Nor stayed to hear him sing
His song of love.—
I fear my speech distorting
His tender love.
The musical
Green finch and linnet bird,
Nightingale, blackbird,
How is it you sing?
How can you jubilate,
Sitting in cages,
Never taking wing?
In Emily Dickinson's poem "Morns like these—we parted—" the last line is: "And this linnet flew!"[15]
Gallery
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Young in nest
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ID composite
References
- . Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ Paynter, Raymond A. Jnr., ed. (1968). Check-list of birds of the world, Volume 14. Vol. 14. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Museum of Comparative Zoology. pp. 255–256.
- ^ Linnaeus, C. (1766). Systema Naturæ per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis, Volume 1 (in Latin). Vol. 1 (10th ed.). Holmiae:Laurentii Salvii. p. 182.
- ^ a b Gill, Frank; Donsker, David (eds.). "Finches, euphonias". World Bird List Version 5.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 5 June 2015.
- PMID 22023825.
- ^ Bechstein, Johann Matthäus (1803). Ornithologisches Taschenbuch von und für Deutschland, oder, Kurze Beschreibung aller Vögel Deutschlands für Liebhaber dieses Theils der Naturgeschichte (in German). Leipzig: Carl Friedrich Enoch Richter. p. 121.
- ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.
- ^ "Linnet". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ "The Mirror of Literature, Issue 274". www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2021-10-06.
- ^ "French President Macron wants to allow trapping of 110,000+ wild birds". 16 September 2021.
- ^ "Robert Burns Country: A Mother's Lament for the Death of Her Son".
- ^ "William Blake (1757-1827). Extracts from Poetical Sketches: Song: 'Memory, hither come'. T. H. Ward, ed. 1880-1918. The English Poets".
- ^ "The LiederNet Archive". 2008-01-11. Retrieved 2016-03-26.
- ^ "Gibbons: 'The Linnet', Op.25". YouTube. 2010-12-06. Retrieved 2016-03-26.[dead YouTube link]
- ^ "Morns like these—we parted by Emily Dickinson".
Further reading
- Winspear, Richard; Davies, Gethin (2005). A Management Guide to Birds of Lowland Farmland. RSPB Management Guides. Sandy, Bedfordshire, UK: OCLC 954855935.
External links
- Common Linnet · Linaria cannabina · (Linnaeus, 1758)—Audio recordings from Xeno-canto
- Linnet (Carduelis cannabina) at Wildscreen's Arkive (videos, stills)
- BBC Wildlifefinder—Videos, sound files and information programmes featuring linnets
- Ageing and sexing (PDF; 4.8 MB) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze