Long -Tailed Tits

 I don't see so many birds on the feeders here as I did at Clay Cottage or at the smallholding and I stopped feeding peanuts as they just went mouldy in all the wet weather we have had.

But one day last week the Long-Tailed Tits arrived all at once - as they do, and having found out why I couldn't get my new camera to focus on zoom (thanks to my son), I was able to get a nice photo.

I wondered what the illustration was for Long Tails in this book which is always on the shelf beside me

And this was it..............

On the page facing each illustration is a description and information about the birds featured.

'Tit' is short for 'titmouse'. One of the first signs of autumn is the visit of a family of long-tailed tit-mice, colloquially 'bumbarrels', to the birdbath. In they swoop .......................Then, as suddenly, they move on, acrobatically upending as they make their busy way from one tree's canopy or hedge to the next.

The country poet John Clare wrote a whole poem about the nest of the Long-tailed Tit which is  a "domed marvel of avian architecture".

The oddling bush, close sheltered hedge new-plashed,

Of which spring's early liking makes a guest

First with a shade of green though winter-dashed

There, full as seen, bumbarrels make a nest

Of mosses grey with cobwebs closely tied

And warm and rich as feather-bed within,

With little hole on it's contrary side

That pathway peepers may no  knowledge win

Of what her little oval nest contains -

Ten eggs and often twelve with dusts of red

Soft frittered -

- and full soon the little lanes

Screen the young crowd and hear the twitt'ring song

Of the old birds who call them to be fed

While down the hedge they hang and hide along.

(From Bumbarrel's Nest)

The nests have been deconstructed and found to contain as many as 2,300 feathers and covered with up to 3,000 flakes of lichen and all constructed in as few as 3 days - busy little birds!

 

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Sue