Aegithalos caudatus

 Almost exactly a year since I included photos of the Aegithalos caudatus, better known as  Long Tailed Tits, flying onto the feeders, here they are again. I love to see them - always arriving in a group and flitting between the feeders and the Ceanothus. 

Long Tailed Tits were birds I'd never seen until they came to the feeders at the smallholding in the 1990's but they must have been more common in other parts of the country because they have a whole list of local dialect names (info originally from Birds Britannica ) but I've never heard of a Suffolk word for them, and they aren't mentioned in my Suffolk dialect book so maybe they weren't so common in Suffolk until garden bird feeding became popular.

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Fuffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, Bottle Tom, Bum Towel,  Prinpriddle, Feather Poke, Long-tailed Mag, Long-tailed Farmer, Can Bottle, Hedge Jug, Bottle Bird, Barrel Tom, Patiney, Patteny Paley, Ragamuffin, Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, Bottle-tit, Billy-featherpoke, Long-tailed Chittering, Puddneypoke, Bottle Builder, Dog Tail, Long Pod, Bush Oven, Oven Bird and Millithrum (Miller’s Thumb)  – all names for a common English bird of hedgerow and heath – the long-tailed tit.

The one name that gets mentioned in poems by the countryside poet John Clare (1793-1864) is Bumbarrel - it's thought this name for them comes from the oval dome-shaped nest they build. This must have been the common name for them in Northamptonshire, where Clare lived.

Emmonsail’s Heath In Winter

I love to see the old heath’s withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree’s topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again

and again in the May section of his book of long poems 'The Shepherds Calendar' he writes

Bum-barrels twit on bush and tree
Scarse bigger then a bumble bee
And in a white thorn’s leafy rest
It builds its curious pudding-nest
Wi' hole beside as if a mouse
Had built the little barrel house.

and yet again in a poem about their nests

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)

I've never seen one of their nests but they've 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.

Back Tomorrow

Sue