Bird of the Month: Blue Tit
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
The late playwright William DouglasHome opened his Spectator review of his brother Henry’s bird memoirs, The Birdman, by saying, ‘There was once a splendid doctor, with a red beard and a wooden leg, called Clifford, in East Meon, where I live. He came to see my wife, one spring, when she had the flu… “You’ve got the same thing as Mrs Chubb’s got at the bottom of the hill,” he told us. Then he added conversationally, “What’s more, she’s got her tits in the letterbox again this year.” ’ The Douglas-homes winced but rallied to acknowledge her good fortune.
Nest boxes, so popular with blue tits, were a 19th-century German introduction, taken over by the British. Our related obsession with feeding songbirds dates from the cruel winter of 1890/91, when British newspapers urged readers to save the starving avian population. Today we spend £200 million a year on bird food alone, more than the whole of the rest of Europe. Of this the blue tit ( Cyanistes caerulus), most numerous of the tit tribe, at three million, is a prime beneficiary.
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 the needle-sharp beak as he clings to the swinging shell.
Then he runs up the trunk, sure-footed and sleek like a mouse, And perches to sun himself; all his body and brain Exult in the sudden sunlight, gladly believing That the cold is over and summer is here again. George Orwell, from Summer-like for an Instant
At Swaythling, Southampton, in 1921 the Leonardo da Vinci of blue tits prised the cap from a doorstep milk bottle left by the daily milkman and thus added digestible and energising cream to its diet. Blue tits lack enzymes to digest the lactose in milk; cream is lactose-free.
Jennifer Ackerman pays the discoverer the ultimate accolade by showing one of its kind supping bottled cream on the cover of her 2016 book, The Genius of Birds. Imitation meant other blue tits, and other tit species and birds benefited. The bonanza ended in the 1980s with health-consciousness and supermarket ascendancy. Crucially, milk was skimmed of its fatty cream.
The 2017 Big Garden Birdwatch showed the blue tit had slipped from third to fourth in the bird top ten. All tits had suffered a 10 per cent decline because the 2016 breeding season had been exceptionally wet, reducing the number of caterpillars. As a baby blue tit can eat a hundred caterpillars a day, and the single annual brood can number sixteen, it is easy to see how a shortage of caterpillars can be cataclysmic. Nest-box cameras have revealed another enemy in the surprising form of the great spotted woodpecker.
The 2018 Bird of the Month calendar is available from carryakroyd.co.uk