FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit

This Is The Korean Crow-Tit - The World's Cutest Bird!

This little birdy is a Korean crow-tit and it looks like a fluffy cotton ball with tiny wings.

It's a little poof ball!

LOOK AT ITS TINY WINGS!

The above rhapsody is from a site called Sunny Skyz, which posts mostly, I believe, sunny, funny, adorable things, which these bird pictures definitely are.

I looked up the fluffball birdie elsewhere, and it appeared on a few other bouncy, flouncy, good-news sites, along with (groannn, inevitably) Pinterest.

I quickly became enamored of this poofball, compared (on one page) with "something a little kid would make out of a cotton ball". I even made a little animation with it (somewhere below).

But then I began to have my doubts.

I began to have my doubts when I looked for information about this bird, and hit a complete and total dead end.

Wikipedia, which has entries on just about every species of bird, bee, animal and plant, had nothing at all on it, in spite of a massive entry on Korean bird species that ran into the hundreds. 

It got worse. My beloved Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (which I refer to almost daily now that I have become a Bird Nerd) had nothing on it either. Tits, yes! There are many kinds of tits, and I have heard all the jokes. But no Korean crow-tit.

I had a growing suspicion, one I've had many times before. Somebody was having me on.

After googling around fruitlessly and only finding endless replications of the cute little fluff-balls, with no information about them at all, I came across a startling entry from a site,about a Korean "boy band" called BTS. Once I read it, I was more confused than ever:

Now the video I linked says, "They call me a try-hard", but I think it's more accurate to leave the word 'baepsae', or 'crow-tit'. This hinges on the fact that this song utilizes a well-known phrase in Korea: "If a crow-tit walks like a stork, it will tear its legs". A crow-tit is a bird with a small stride because it has short legs, and when we compare this with a stork who has much taller legs, we see that the stork would easily be able to travel farther with less effort.

(Video removed by YouTube)

The song itself mentions the stork and the crow-tit multiple times, the "crow-tits" being the generation from which BTS members come, whereas the "storks" are the generation prior. The stork generation is comprised of parents, teachers, employees- people the younger generation is meant to be able to look up to and to learn from.

So somebody probably extracted the name from that song and attached it to pictures of a very cute bird which nobody can readily identify. How many people know about the old Korean legend of the crow-tit, and how it might tear its little legs if it walks like a stork? Fans of BTS, perhaps, though this strikes me as a little obscure.

My question is, how many people accepted this fluffy little hoax without question? Quite a few, it seems. The white birdie has been around since some time last year, and I haven't seen it challenged (until now!).

BLOGGER'S P. S. I just emailed the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, which has never failed me yet in providing information about all things bird. That's what I love about them. There is always a human being there, and one that loves and knows about birds. Usually they get back to you post-haste.

So if and when I get an answer about the real identity of this tiny little poofball, I'll update you immediately. Myself, I can hardly wait! 

UPDATE: MUCH later, and the comments are still coming! Rosy Novelist posted these remarks, but the links weren't live, so here they are with links. 

Rosy Novelist has left a new comment on the post "FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit":

Hi! I'm a South Korean currently studying in the U.S. I came across this blog post and couldn't help but leave a message.

So the white fluffy bird is actually a Long-tailed tit. In Korean, it's "오목눈이." This Korean YouTuber uploaded a video about how the Korean baepsae is commonly mistakened with it.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-mTP52IqM4. It's in Korean but when you look at 00:47, she explains with the visuals.

The long tailed tit is a common bird found throughout Europe and the Palearctic. Here is the distribution map from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-tailed_tit#/media/File:Schwanzmeise_(Aegithalos_caudatus)_distribution_map.png.

So, it is a lovely bird that is found throughout Eurasia. Koreans have seen it throughout its history and called it "오목눈이" while in different cultures, they are called something else.

So I think the "Korean crow tit" is not the right name for the fluffy bird because 1) Birds don't have nationalities 2) it's a long tailed tit.

The notion that it's a Japanese bird or a Korean bird or any other nationality bird is pretty ridiculous. Birds are birds and they are lovely! :)

Rosy Novelist has left a new comment on the post "FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit":

Exactly! Baepsaes are parrotbills - brownish fluffs found in Korea as well as elsewhere. The white fluffs are long tailed tits that are migratory birds that stay from Europe to Asia.

I think this post also explains well: https://aminoapps.com/c/btsarmy/page/blog/fake-bird-news-alert-baepsae-does-not-mean-crow-tit/D8BQ_p81hPurDKYqJJKgwMxBNWMKXg17dg