A little while back I teased an image I was work­ing on, and asked what sort of peri­odic table it was. I can now reveal the answer: it’s a peri­odic table of the order Paridae, that is to say tit­mice, chickadees and tits.

Click through for the embig­gi­fied ver­sion of the image.

I’ve long been a fan of birds and their mark­ings, so this was a fun pro­ject for me. In the apple tree in our garden we have lots of little birds, and it’s always cool to watch them flit­ting about, chirp­ing and hav­ing ador­able little fights.

I’m no orni­tho­lo­gist, so all the tax­onomy and mark­ing inform­a­tion was taken from Wikipedia and the inter­net. I wanted it to be semi-abstract (indeed ‘abstract faces’ was one of the guesses for the text­less ver­sion) so the mark­ings are more ‘this is what the mark­ings would be like if birds were square’.

Pro-tip: birds are not square.

By the way, turns out that typ­ing ‘tits’ into Google doesn’t just return images of the order Paridae; who knew?