Canary Islands Chiffchaff - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Previously the Canary Island Chiffchaff was considered as a subspecies of the Common Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita). Now it is recognised as a separate species under the name Phylloscopus canariensis (Clement & Helbig, 1998; Sangster et al., 2002) for the following reasons (compared to the Common Chiffchaff) (Helbig et al., 1996):

• Smaller in size
• Shorter wings
• Wings rounder
• Vocalizations different
• mtDNA sequence divergence