thumb| Anthus campestris [[MHNT]]

The tawny pipit (Anthus campestris) is a medium-large passerine bird which breeds in much of the central Palearctic from northwest Africa and Portugal to Central Siberia and on to Inner Mongolia. It is a migrant moving in winter to tropical Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

alt=A. c. griseus overwintering in India|thumb|Overwintering in India

Taxonomy

The tawny pipit was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with the larks and pipits in the genus Alauda and coined the binomial name Alauda campestris. Linnaeus specified the type locality as Europe but this has been restricted to Sweden. The specific epithet campestris is Latin meaning "of the fields", from campus meaning "field". The tawny pipit is now one of over 40 species placed in the genus Anthus that was introduced in 1805 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein. The species is considered to be monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.

Description

This is a large pipit, long with wing-span ,

Its song is a short repetition of a loud disyllabic chir-ree chir-ree.

Food and feeding

The tawny pipit is insectivorous, like its relatives. Eric Hosking's footage of the pipits was actually of meadow pipits because he could not get genuine tawny pipits from German-occupied Europe.

References

  • Ageing and sexing (PDF; 3.2 MB) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze