Grey-headed Chickadee

The grey-headed chickadee or Siberian tit (Poecile cinctus) is a passerine bird in the tit family Paridae. It is a widespread resident breeder throughout subarctic Scandinavia and the northern Palearctic, and also into North America in Alaska and the far northwest of Canada. It is a conifer specialist. It is resident, and most birds do not migrate. It is a fairly large tit, at 12.5–14 cm long and with a weight of 11–14.3 g intermediate between willow tit and great tit. The head is dark brown (darkest on the throat and eyestripe, the crown slightly paler) with white cheeks, the mantle cinnamon-brown, the wing feathers blackish with pale fringes, and the underparts whitish with pale rusty-brown flanks. == Taxonomy == The grey-headed chickadee was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1779 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Siberia. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined…