The Redpolls are a group of small
passerine birds in the
finch family Fringillidae which have characteristic red markings on their heads. They were formerly placed into the genus
Acanthis together with the
linnets and the
twite, but their closest relatives are actually the
crossbills, that are placed in the genus
Loxia (Arnaiz-Villena et al., 2001). The latter genus could be merged with
Carduelis in a single genus, for which the name
Loxia would then have priority. But this would imply to change the name of a large number of species, and as their adaptations and
biogeography are evolutionarily quite peculiar, it would be better to reinstate Acanthis instead, including only the redpolls. There are several different very closely related (Seutin et al., 1995) forms of redpolls which could be considered as anything from one to five species (Knox, 1988). Recent studies (Herremans, 1990; Sangster et al., 2002) tend to support three species, but this is certainly not definite.
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