Mexican chickadee
species of bird
The Mexican chickadee (Poecile sclateri) is a small passerine songbird in the family Paridae, the tits and chickadees. It is found in Mexico and the U. S. states of Arizona and New Mexico.
Taxonomy and systematics
The Mexican chickadee was originally described in 1857 as Parus meridionalis by Philip Sclater. However, that species name had already been applied to another species (the marsh tit, now Poecile palustris), by Wilhelm Lilljeborg in 1852, invalidating Sclater's name under the principle of priority. Otto Kleinschmidt noted this, and renamed it Parus sclateri in 1897, honoring the original discoverer. It remained included in the genus Parus for much of the twentieth century. Following a 1996 publication, in 1998 the American Ornithologists' Union reassigned it to Poecile, a genus that had been erected in 1829 and had long been treated as a subgenus of Parus. A 2005 paper used mtDNA cytochrome b sequence data and morphology to agree with that change and suggest it should be universally adopted. BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World did so in 2016 and the IOC and the Clements taxonomy followed suit by 2018.
The Mexican chickadee has four accepted subspecies:
P. s.
“Mexican chickadee” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mexican, chickadee and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q530337. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1857, 1852, 1897 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mexican chickadee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.