This is the blue tit, the second most seen bird in last year`s British Bird Watch. And it also has relatives, eight of them, across the globe.
The card we feature may look like our own little friend, but it is, in fact, the Eurasian blue-tit, and we know that not just because it is a European card, but by the fact that the text, top left, calls it "Parus Coeruleus". "Parus" being classical Latin for small, and "Caeruleus" meaning blue. As you can see, our card gets the first word slightly wrong. Now this was the very first Latin name ever given to this bird, though, by Conrad Gesner, in 1555, and, like this card, he came from Switzerland. Later on, almost two hundred years after, in 1758, none other than Carl Linnaeus also used the same name. Then, in 2005, because our ability to sequence DNA is so much better than it was in either of those times, scientists discovered that it was slightly misaligned, and not really the same as the other "Panus" species - so they renamed it "Cyanistes Caeruleus", a rather odd term, translating to "dark blue, blue".
As for the second line, "Mesanges Bleu", that combines many different languages, and encompasses many centuries, for the first word has referred to a mouse like bird since Medieval times. "Bleu" is blue of course.
Now we have a main page for the issuers of this card and you will find that as the Card of the Day for the 29th of December 2022. This set was again reissued later, as "series 53", and with the capital letter "B" in the middle of the bottom border. Our set is "Serie LV" and has no central initial. However this exact card 1 of the blue tit is repeated in the set which was only issued by Nestle as serie X, though all the other cards are different. Cailler also has an own set of "Oiseaux", again serie X, and that is different too, it has card 1 as the robin. Actually there are many sets by this name, sometimes with suffixes to make life even more confusing. But the checklist for our set, the co-production of all four companies, and marked up as serie 53, is as follows
- Blue Tit
- Black Redstart
- Blackbird
- Nightingale
- Barn Swallow
- Curl Bunting
- Starling
- Skylark
- White Wagtail
- Cuckoo
- Hoopoe
- Green Woodpecker