Eurasian wren
Troglodytes troglodytes
— Where the name comes from
Troglodytes is “one who enters caves”, from trṓglē, the hole, and dýō, to go in: the same word the Greeks used for peoples they believed lived in caves. Said of a nine-gram bird it describes its habit of slipping into every crack in a wall, woodpile or upturned root. The Italian name is onomatopoeic instead, from the dry insistent call.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Passerines
- Habitat
- Understorey, dry-stone walls, gardens, damp ravines
- Range
- Europe, North Africa, Asia; related species throughout the Americas
- Size
- 9–10 cm, wingspan 13–17 cm, 8–13 g
- Diet
- Spiders, tiny insects, larvae
- Lifespan
- 2 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It holds its tail cocked straight up like an exclamation mark.
- 02
The male builds up to a dozen nests and the female picks one.
- 03
In winter dozens of them sleep heaped together in the same cavity.
— What sets it apart
It has the most powerful song in Europe for its weight: a bird that would fit in a spoon produces a trill audible half a kilometre away, at an energetic cost which, scaled to our size, would be a man shouting without pause for half an hour. On freezing nights that same smallness becomes a problem, and the solution is social: more than sixty wrens have been counted packed into a single nest box, stacked in layers to keep from freezing.
