Crowned Kinglet
by Walter Colvin
Title
Crowned Kinglet
Artist
Walter Colvin
Medium
Digital Art - Digital Art Fine Painting
Description
Digital fine art painting of two Crowned Kinglets and flowers.
The ruby-crowned kinglet (Regulus calendula) is a very small passerine bird found throughout North America. It is a member of the kinglet family. The bird has olive-green plumage with two white wing bars and a white eye-ring. Males have a red crown patch, which is usually concealed. The sexes are identical (apart from the crown), and juveniles are similar in plumage to adults. It is one of the smallest songbirds in North America. The ruby-crowned kinglet is not closely related to other kinglets, and is put in its own subgenus, Corthylio. Three subspecies are currently recognized.
The kinglet is migratory, and its range extends from northwest Canada and Alaska south to Mexico. Its breeding habitat is spruce-fir forests in the northern and mountainous regions of the United States and Canada. The ruby-crowned kinglet builds a cup-shaped nest, which may be pensile or placed on a tree branch and is often hidden. It lays up to 12 eggs, and has the largest clutch of any North American passerine for its size. It is mainly insectivorous, but also eats fruits and seeds.
he ruby-crowned kinglet is a very small bird, being 9 to 11 cm (3.5 to 4.3 in) long, having a wingspan of 16 to 18 cm (6.3 to 7.1 in), and weighing 5 to 10 g (0.2 to 0.4 oz).[2] It has gray-green upperparts and olive-buff underparts. It has two white wingbars and a broken white eye ring. The wingbar on the greater secondary coverts (closer to the wing-tip) is wider, and is next to a dark band. The kinglet has a relatively plain face and head, although the male has a scarlet-red crown patch, which is usually concealed by the surrounding feathers. The crown patch is rarely orange, yellow, or not present. Females are identical to males (except for the crown). Immature birds are similar to adult females, since young males lack a crown patch. The kinglet usually moves along branches or through foliage with short hops, and flies with bursts of rapid wing beats. It is constantly active, and is easily recognized by its characteristic wing-flicking. Its flight has been described as "swift, jerky, and erratic".
Compared to the related golden-crowned kinglet, the ruby-crowned kinglet is slightly larger, more elongated, and has greener plumage. The bird can be mistaken for the Hutton's vireo, which also displays wing-flicking, though less frequently than the kinglet. It can also be mistaken for the dwarf vireo in Mexico. However, both of the vireos are larger, have stouter bills and legs, and lack the kinglet's black bar on the wings.
The kinglets are a small group of birds sometimes included in the Old World warblers, but frequently given family status, especially as recent research showed that, despite superficial similarities, the crests are taxonomically remote from the warblers. The names of the family, Regulidae, and its only genus, Regulus, are derived from the Latin regulus, a diminutive of rex, "a king",and refer to the characteristic orange or yellow crests of adult kinglets. The ruby-crowned kinglet was first described in 1766, in the 12th edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. Its species name means "by the month", and is shared with a genus of flower.
As a result of its larger size, strongly red (rather than orange or yellow) crest and lack of black crown stripes, as well as its distinctive vocalisations, the ruby-crowned kinglet is sometimes considered different enough from the Old World kinglets and the other American species, the golden-crowned kinglet, to be sometimes assigned to a separate genus, Corthylio.
Up to five subspecies have been recognized, but "cineraceus", breeding in montane western North America, and "arizonensis", breeding in Arizona, are considered to be clinal variants of the nominate subspecies. The form grinnellii, breeding from southeast Alaska to British Columbia differs significantly from nominate calendula, and so is considered to be represent a valid subspecies: it is smaller and shorter-winged, its upperparts are darker and greener, its underparts are buffy rather than grayish olive, and the vent is tinged yellow rather than dull whitish olive. The subspecies obscurus, from Guadalupe Island, off Baja California, is considered endangered, and may already be extinct.
Hybridization with golden-crowned kinglet has been reported to have possibly occurred.
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January 27th, 2018
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