Description
It is a robust typical warbler, mainly grey in plumage. Like most Sylvia species, it has distinct male and female plumages: The male has the small black cap from which the species gets its name, whereas in the female the cap is brown. It is a bird of shady woodlands with ground cover for nesting. The nest is built in a low shrub, and 3–6 eggs are laid. The song is a pleasant chattering with some clearer notes; it can be confused with that of the Garden Warbler, but in the Eurasian Blackcap, it is slightly higher pitched, more broken into discrete individual songs (more continuous rambling song in Garden Warbler) and characteristically ends with an emphatic fluting warble. In isolated Eurasian Blackcap populations (such as in valleys or on peninsulas and small islands), a simplified song can occur; this song is said to have a Leiern-type ("drawling") ending after the term used by German ornithologists who first described it. The introduction is like that in other Blackcaps, but the final warbling part is a simple alteration between two notes, as in a Great Tit's call but more fluting.
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