Wasting time keeping an eye out for marauders
They are ripping out the cobwebs everywhere. I have been trying to write but they constantly catch my eye with their manic destruction. Busy is hardly the word.
They are obsessed. They are just outside my study window and I sit and watch spellbound. Within a yard they spin and weave the gossamer into bundles with their puny beaks.
You see, cobwebs are the mortar in this building trade. All those spiders with their burrows in-between the bricks of this old house thought they were safe. All those old mothers with their bundles of babies in cocoons were on to a good thing. Or so they thought.
Then along comes this tiny tit and pulls their creche to pieces. Of course, it is all in a good cause. A bigger creche, another huge nursery: not for spiders, but for birds. Isn’t that what spiders are for? To feed others with their big fat juicy bundles? After all we humans eat their bigger cousins, the crabs.
Off goes the bottle tit with its glue, and almost immediately is back searching the bricks. In a minute it has ripped out a nice big green one off the bark of the cherry tree. Actually it is what we call moss. Father tit cheers with a ‘chee-cheechee’ and brings his own ‘brick’ offering. Together the couple lay the foundation.
The structure now looks like the cup of a chaffinch’s nest.
Mrs tit disappears into this tiny bowl and her long tail goes round and round like a stirring spoon. I watch, mesmerised, and stir my coffee in exactly the same way. I have given up trying to write. This occupation is much more interesting. Time spent in reconnaissance is time wasted I tell myself.
And over the next week much more time will be not wasted. This pair of tiny tits will build their home into an elongated round dome. They will make a small side entrance, just large enough for a ten-piece coin to pass. They will then complete the tiles on the roof: flakes of lichen, which will be attached with more spiders’ webs.
Next will come the best bit – the interior decoration and soft furnishings. 2,000 feathers will be found, somehow, from all over the nearby locality. Pigeons plucked by sparrow hawks, cock pheasants having a dust bath, a siskin flying into the window and shedding a few tiny wisps, a robin having a bath. All such feather bounty will
be brought back for the cosiest nest in Christendom.
There is another female involved in this couple’s dream house by the way. As one occasionally hears about humans, the man of the house has two ladies in tow this year. So the nest that does not waste my time will soon perhaps have 12 eggs inside, each the size of a pea. Out of which will hatch a dozen children, each as big as a newborn pygmy shrew. Just as well long-tailed tits are devoted parents.
These tiny, confiding, and beautiful birds are quite common in the woods of Sussex even after a hard winter, despite the question of the avaricious landlords. Crows, magpies, grey squirrels, stoats, rats, weasels, love to rip the roof the masterbuilders’ classic residences and steal the treasures that lay within.
So I shall just have to waste more time keeping an eye constantly out to frighten off all these marauders.