Blue Tit
This is a blue tit in our garden. A common bird – nothing to write home about perhaps. But every picture tells a tale. I started telling the tale in this post A Nest Box for Sparrows last year. We had scaffolding on the house and used it to erect a nest box to replace the old sparrow nests under our roof. Before I became a wildlife cameraman I had scores of nest boxes of all types around our home and thought I knew a bit about them. I was totally wrong about the outcome in this instance.
Within a couple of hours of the box going up sparrows were looking in it. But, out of nowhere a pair of blue tits appeared. We hardly ever have blue tits in the garden – our house seems to be a bit too far from the nearest decent habitat. So how come they spotted the nest box so soon. As all of the panel members of TV singing shows now say, “They made it their own.” Natural nest sites for hole nesting birds are hard to come by. That’s not all they need though. The bird in the picture had just bathed in the small pools attached to our pond. The pond itself is only six feet long. The Japanese Maple it is sheltering in was planted by us in 1999. It’s quite big now. We bought it from Woolworths when there was a Woolworths in Chepstow. The tree, though non-native, harbours loads of insects, which I have seen tits and sparrows eating. The fresh buds are nipped off by the sparrows: I’m not sure about this, but the tree seems to cope! We used a mesh basket on the bird feeder and stuffed it with moss and hair, all of which was eagerly gathered by the tits. It now fills the nest box. The garden has plenty of shelter, nooks and crannies, and doesn’t get doused in chemicals. The blue tits have dominated the area around the nest box. I have seen both birds many times side by side, and judging by the behaviour I say with confidence that the male is a fair bit bigger than the female. Watch this space, because no doubt I’ll be wrong about that too.
I have made a double sparrow sized box to compensate the sparrows for their loss, but I’m not convinced they’ll use it. Cats are a massive problem around here, and with the crows and magpies it’s a miracle anything has any breeding success at all.