Species Spotlight

Species Spotlight: Eurasian Wren

March 6, 2026 by Kai Pflug No Comments

First, we would like to thank the Taiwanese subspecies of the Eurasian Wren (which is uncreatively named Troglodytes troglodytes taivanus) for providing the photos shown in this post.

This particular subspecies – not being the Icelandic one – thus is not featured in excitingly titled papers such as “Genetic divergence of Troglodytes troglodytes islandicus from other subspecies of Eurasian wren in northwestern Europe”. Poor subspecies.

Indeed, the Eurasian Wren has 29 subspecies, maybe too many to cover each of them in a separate paper. To me, this number seems to be somewhat excessive for a tiny bird that mostly looks like an angry ping-pong ball (though with an added rear spoiler).

Anyone who has ever watched this wren – in Iceland, Taiwan, Germany, or elsewhere – knows about them favoring messy areas. And as “messy areas” does not sound very good in scientific papers, we will here use the term “brush piles” – and indeed, another paper finds that “the presence of brush piles is positively correlated with Eurasian Wren occurrence.”

Other papers on the wren contain existentialist-sounding sentences such as “Eurasian Wrens avoid overlapping but not avoid being overlapped”.

Apparently, when hearing other wrens sing, wrens preferably start their own song right after the end of a competitor’s song. I am not quite sure, however, how a wren could possibly “avoid being overlapped” other than by killing (or at least silencing) another wren. Fortunately, I am not a wren myself, so I do not have to seriously deal with these and similar philosophical questions.

The HBW includes spiders in the diet of wrens, and one of the wrens I talked to indeed provided photographic proof of this.

On the other hand, apparently the diet of Japanese Ratsnakes includes Eurasian Wrens, and these generally rather antisocial snakes even somehow interact with each other when there is a chance to eat wren nestlings. Admittedly, I do not recommend giving the paper in which this is described to any wren, particularly close to their bedtime.

Written by Kai Pflug
Kai has lived in Shanghai for 22 years. He only started birding after moving to China, so he is far more familiar with Chinese birds than the ones back in his native Germany. As a birder, he considers himself strictly average and tries to make up for it with photography, which he shares on a separate website. Alas, most of the photos are pretty average as well. He hopes that few clients of his consulting firm—focused on China’s chemical industry—ever find this blog, as it might raise questions about his professional priorities. Much of his time is spent either editing posts for 10,000 Birds or cleaning the litter boxes of his numerous indoor cats. He occasionally considers writing a piece comparing the two activities.