Bird of the Month: Great Tit
John Mcewen
February marks the spring for birds. And the great tit ( Parus major) is one of the first to signal the fact.
‘BB’ called songbirds ‘the little people’. And the great tit’s vernal repetition, to my ear (no birdsong translation ever quite seems to match), sounds like the ‘dink dink’ of a silver hammer driving in a silver nail. Among its old names are sawfinch and carpenter bird.
Great tits are noted for intelligence. Science suggests they possess logic: their repertoire of 40 calls and songs is considered a defensive ploy to scare off rival males, persuading them there is an army to confront. The variety of songs can also hoodwink ornithologists.
In any case, as Wordsworth wrote, we humans overanalyse nature: Sweet is the lore which Nature brings Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. Wordsworth, from The Tables Turned
When my wife was dying from cancer, songbirds coming to feed from her hand was a sweet consolation. This was in London’s Kenwood, on Hampstead Heath. The work of getting the local birds – blue and great tits, a robin and a nuthatch, but never the shy coal tit – to hand-feed was a precious legacy of bird-lovers past.
We would stand by a fence to await arrivals in the holly bushes, bearing extended palms full of sunflower seed. In freezing weather, these seeds can supply 44 per cent of a great tit’s bodyweight.
Nothing makes one more aware of the danger-filled life of a songbird than that tremulous moment of trust, when its needle nails grip the hand and, for a split second, it throws caution to the winds to feed.
By far the boldest birds were the great tits. We tested this by eventually sitting on the bench opposite, daring them to brave the dangerous exposure of the broad path. How dangerous was brutally revealed one afternoon, when a sparrowhawk flashed past at waist height. That even the boldest great tit took minutes of indecision before swooping over showed its awareness of the deathly risk.
Great tits are as bold in plumage as in spirit. The brighter the male’s yellow breast and the broader the dark-blue band that divides it, the more attractive it is to a female. Carotenoids enrich both and help the bird withstand the free radicals which weaken fertility. Breadth of song repertoire also attracts a mate.
Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Foreign Secretary at the beginning of the First World War, described a rat trap that had unintentionally caught a great tit and a dunnock. In extremis, the tit had killed the dunnock and eaten half its brain.
One day, we arrived at Kenwood to be told a jay had just dismembered a great tit in the tree above the bench. On leaving, we would see the enemies of the ‘little people’ had already silently and disturbingly reappeared to benefit from any leftovers – carrion crows, magpies, squirrels, each one a harbinger of death. Et in Arcadia ego.