The willow tit (Poecile montanus) is a passerine bird in the tit family, Paridae. It is a widespread and common resident breeder throughout temperate and subarctic Europe and across the Palearctic. The plumage is grey-brown and off-white with a black cap and bib. It is more of a conifer specialist than the closely related marsh tit, which explains it breeding much further north. It is resident, and most birds do not migrate. Taxonomy The willow tit was described in 1827 by the Swiss naturalist Thomas Conrad von Baldenstein under the trinomial name Parus cinereus montanus. The type locality is the mountain forests in the Canton of Grisons, Switzerland. The willow tit is now placed in the genus Poecile that was erected by the German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup in 1829. The genus name, Poecile, is the Ancient Greek name for a now unidentifiable small bird, and the specific montanus is Latin for "of the mountains". Poecile was at one time treated as a subgenus within the genus Parus but molecular taxonomic analysis, using both nuclear and mitochondrial genes, supports Poecile as a distinct clade. Within Poecile, most of the Old World species (including the willow tit) form a separate clade from the New World chickadees. The taxonomic analysis has shown that the willow tit is sister to the Caspian tit (Poecile hyrcanus). There are 14 recognised subspecies: P. m. kleinschmidti (Hellmayr, 1900) – Britain P. m. rhenanus (Kleinschmidt, 1900) – northwest France to west Germany, north Switzerland and north Italy P. m. montanus (Conrad von Baldenstein, 1827) – southeast France to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece P. m. salicarius (Brehm, CL, 1831) – Germany and west Poland to northeast Switzerland and Austria P. m. borealis (de Sélys-Longchamps, 1843) – Scandinavia south to Ukraine P. m. uralensis (Grote, 1927) – southeast European Russia, west Siberia and Kazakhstan P. m. baicalensis Swinhoe, 1871 – central east, east Siberia, north Mongolia, north China and north Korea P. m. anadyrensis (Belopolski, 1932) – northeast Siberia P. m. kamtschatkensis Bonaparte, 1850 – Kamchatka Peninsula and north Kuril Islands P. m. sachalinensis (Lönnberg, 1908) – Sakhalin and south Kuril Islands P. m. restrictus (Hellmayr, 1900) – Japan P. m. songarus (Severtsov, 1873) – southeast Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan and northwest China P. m. affinis Przevalski, 1876 – central north China P. m. stoetzneri (Kleinschmidt, 1921) – northeast China The Sichuan tit (Poecile weigoldicus) was formerly treated as a