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
Read more about this topic: Canary Islands Chiffchaff