If there were an award for the most underrated British garden bird, the blue tit may well come out on top. Feisty and fascinating, this colourful little creature is so common and familiar that we often take it for granted.
This could be because of the blue tit’s ubiquity. In both the main garden bird surveys in the UK – the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch and the long-running BTO Garden BirdWatch – the species is always in the top five. With roughly 3 million breeding pairs, blue tits are as common in urban and suburban gardens as they are in rural ones.
They are also one of the most frequent visitors to bird feeders, where they more than hold their own against their larger cousin the great tit. Yet they weigh just 11 grams (less than half an ounce) – roughly the same as a handful of paperclips or a two-pound coin.
In my Somerset garden, blue tits have just started to sing their rather unassuming song: a series of repeated notes ending with a brief trill. They will soon be looking for nest sites in tree holes or nestboxes, where later in the spring the female will lay between eight and 10 tiny eggs.
Blue tits only raise a single brood, but this takes a huge amount of effort: once the chicks hatch the parents will bring back about 1,000 items of food – mostly caterpillars – every single day.
