Marsh warbler
Acrocephalus palustris
— Where the name comes from
Acrocephalus joins the Greek ákros, “pointed”, and kephalḗ, “head”, for the profile of the forehead running into the bill. Palustris means “of marshes”, though this warbler, unlike its relatives, lives not in reedbeds but in the tall, dense vegetation of damp margins.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Passerines
- Habitat
- Tall herbage: nettles, meadowsweet, bushes near water and fields
- Range
- Breeds in Europe and western Asia; winters in south-eastern Africa
- Size
- 13–15 cm, 11–15 g
- Diet
- Insects, spiders, some berries in autumn
- Lifespan
- A few years
— Characteristics
- 01
It is olive-brown, almost impossible to tell by sight from the reed warbler.
- 02
It reaches Europe late, at the end of May, and leaves again in July.
- 03
Its song is a continuous, very fast stream of imitations.
— What sets it apart
It is one of the finest mimics in the world, and it sings Africa in Europe. A male can weave into his song the voices of around seventy different species, and in the 1970s the researcher Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire found that almost half are African birds: the warblers learn their calls during the winter in East Africa and bring them back to the meadows of Europe. Listening to a male in a Belgian or Polish field you can recognise bulbuls, drongos and weavers that have never left their continent.
