Behold friendly blue tits
Up to 200 may visit your feeder in just one day!
Spend a minute or two watching your garden feeders at the moment and it shouldn’t be long before a blue tit turns up. Or, more probably, a few blue tits – they like to have company.
You could say that the blue tit is the garden birder’s garden bird. Blackbirds, robins, sparrows, starlings and others are close to common-or-garden, but they would be there whatever you choose to do. However, if you put out feeders full of peanuts or suet balls then it won’t be long before a blue tit checks in for a feed. There’s a relationship of sorts between us and them.
And at this time of year just about every garden where the birds are catered for has blue tit visitors. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) runs a survey that pools week-by-week bird records from the gardens of volunteers, and the blue tit is one of most-spotted birds.
Only the blackbird charts higher. A little over nine out of every 10 of the survey’s gardens gets at least one blue tit visit each week. Many get more.
You may think that the same little group of blue tits are hanging around your feeders all day, but that’s not the case. They visit and move on, to be replaced by others – up to 200 different individuals may visit a single feeder in just one day! The next most common tit family member to visit feeders at this time of year is the great tit. About four out of five gardens get a visit as wild food gets scarcer in woodland.
Last, but not least, there’s the coal tit. Usually they’re seen in about four gardens in every 10, but this winter it’s closer to seven out of 10. It’s thought that they’re a more common sight this winter because the conifer seed that they like to eat is hard to find this year.
When a coal tit does arrive in your garden, it’s often its way of moving that gets it noticed. Where other birds will happily hang around a feeder, a coal tit will dash in, take one morsel of food and flit off out of sight. Then, the speedy visits will be repeated time and again using the same flight line.
It looks a bit of a waste of energy, but it isn’t. What this clever little bird is doing is building up a larder for later use.