Big news from the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch survey results just out: the long-tailed tit has made it, for the first time in the survey's 30-year history, into the top 10.
Big news from the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch survey results just out: the long-tailed tit has made it, for the first time in the survey's 30-year history, into the top 10. I hardly ever saw these gregarious little birds until I moved to East Dulwich a decade ago. Until then, I'd always associated them with the pine plantations and heathlands of the Sussex High Weald. We now regularly get them, along with blue- and great tits, charging through the garden in a loose-knit gaggle.
The RSPB put the bird's recent success down to the possibility that it has adapted to eating seeds and peanuts on bird tables and garden feeders. Normally it is mainly an insect feeder. This is obviously good news for the bird, and for the RSPB, which actively advocates bird-feeding.
For the last two years, I've been able to get really close to long-tailed tits, but this is nothing to do with my bird table, but my choice of holiday cottage. Two years running we rented a small cottage near Carisbrooke Castle, in the Isle of Wight and there was an almost tame long-tailed attached to the house. Every day it would flutter at the small side window to the living room, knocking with its body on the glass, and leaving a significant smear of dust and feathers in one corner. The window could not open, and it puzzled us why this bird should spend so much time trying to get in.
If it wasn't downstairs, it was upstairs at the bedroom, where glass doors led out onto a small balcony. Again, it would flutter at the glass, then perch on the door handle and seemed to peer longingly inside. It always flew off if I opened the door, and never once flew indoors if we left the door ajar. What was going on?
I've never really got to the bottom of this. The only thought was that it might have been showing some sort of territorial behaviour, fluttering at its reflection, which it saw as a rival. But these birds live in groups, so isn't that counter to taking a territory?
Any answers on a postcard please. Or you can comment below.
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