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?