Columnist Nicola Miller: Hidden Tiger, Crouching Bluetit
Don’t be fooled by their sweet exterior, a dumpling of blue-green and yellow bobbing from hedge to feeder to fence and then back again like tiny feathered globes. When blue tits arrive in your garden they come with a vengeance, all needle-slash of claw and lethal-weapon beaks and their fierce reputation has followed them across time and literature.
Blue tits might look as if they belong in a Disney film, swirling around the head of a princess, tweeting words of love, but in reality, they are aggressive, furious balls of spitting ire and possessiveness. George Orwell knew this when he depicted the forensically precise beak work of this tiny creature:
‘A blue-tit darts with a flash of wings, to feed
Where the coconut hangs on the pear tree over the well;
He digs at the meat like a tiny pickaxe tapping
With his needle-sharp beak as he clings to the swinging shell.’
In the UK, blue tits start scouting for a nesting site in January and once they have chosen one, will defend it until they start nest-building in March and April. The competition for a mate is fierce, their calls are scolding and filled with fury. Adults brook no competition during the breeding season but will move and feed in protective flocks afterwards, looping from one place to another in short bursts of flight. I had to remove a garden mirror after it ended up smeared with blue tit blood as a lonely male bird set out to attack and drive off his [rival] reflection, battering his head half to bits in the attempt. They possess sturdy, well-defined head markings with a dark blue-black eyestripe and a skull cap of brighter blue, set against their white cheeks and forehead which, in the case of my star crossed lover, darkened with blood as he wheeled and slew into the glass of the mirror. When fighting, they attack each other’s eyes.
His aggression shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. Author and ornithologist Howard Saunders wrote about European great tits who “attack small and weakly birds, splitting their skulls with its powerful beak to get at their brains; and it has even been known to serve a bat in this manner”, but seeing such a tiny bird driven to death by its desire to mate was disturbing, despite knowing its proclavities.
Once paired, mating is accompanied by a soundtrack of high pitched notes, similar to the begging call a female blue tit may make when a male blue tit enters the nest with freshly killed food. She will time the laying of her eggs so that they hatch just as the caterpillars on which they feed their nestlings arrive. The babies emerge looking uncannily like miniature versions of the actor Tommy Lee Jones, their eathered brows set above darkly irate eyes.
A nest full of baby birds is filled with conflict and competition: the needs of the adults must be balanced against the needs of each chick and the brood as a whole. The parents compete with their chicks for food. This is where we come in, providing supplementary feeding throughout the winter hunger gap and during nest building and breeding. In Suffolk, we haven’t had decent, penetrative rain for what feels like months; the farmers have been watering their fields for weeks, something that should not be required in spring; and as avian habitats continue to decline and cat ownership goes up, our birds seem set for another challenging breeding season.
Remember that not all feeding areas are created equal. Larger bird feeders and bird tables tend to attract larger, more voracious birds who easily fend off tits and consume food faster, making it trickier for other birds to eat enough food to maintain body weight, expending precious energy fighting for their share. If your bird table has hooks to hang nut feeders, shells and fat balls from, alongside a flat table top for larger birds to eat off, members of the tit family don’t tend to come off very well. Despite their supple, dexterous bodies and beaks, they can end up crowded out.
Birds from the tit family are aerial acrobats, able to feed upside down, contort themselves into the tiniest of spaces to extract food (watch a blue tit or coal tit feed from hanging coconut shells and you’ll see what I mean) and semi-hover in the air to peck at nut feeders. So hang up small feeders that only the tits can reach, filled with peanuts, fat, niger seeds and sunflower hearts. Hang them at different levels at different sites, then sit back and watch your own avian version of Hidden Tiger, Crouching Bluetit.
