I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t adore a Long-tailed Tit – and nor would I want to, because that person would clearly be morally defective. Long-tailed Tits simply are adorable, and that’s all there is to it.
What they aren’t, oddly enough is a tit. Like the Bearded Tit, which also isn’t a tit, they’ve been colloquially lumped in with the Paridae family because of their size, but the Long-tailed Tit is actually a member of the Aegithalidae, which includes around a dozen species across three genera, while the Bearded Tit – now increasingly referred to as the Bearded Reedling – is the sole species currently known from the family Panuridae.
All the Aegithalidae are so ridiculously cute, it’s hard to believe they’re living creatures and not just mantlepiece ornaments, but they’re active, social, and cooperative birds, and surprisingly tough. The Long-tailed Tit, which is found right across northern Eurasia from the UK to Japan, is so adaptable and successful that it’s classified by several major conservation organisations, including the British Trust for Ornithology, as being of least conservation concern. That said, local populations can suffer badly during hard winters, with estimated losses of up to 80%, but they tend to bounce back very quickly due to their cooperative breeding strategy: non-breeding adults, and those whose nests have failed, help with the brooding and rearing of chicks at other nests within their extended family group.
During the winter the family group is equally important, because by roosting together in a huddle its members can conserve heat, and thus increase their chances of survival. During the day the group will forage for food across their territory, while maintaining contact with each other through constant calling. At Hillers, where I took both of today’s photos from the hide, it’s much more common to hear a flock of Long-tailed Tits moving through the woodland than to see them, but this afternoon a small group was busy foraging both on the ground and from the various feeders in the clearing, and I was completely spoiled for photos.
The featured portrait is my favourite image of the day, but I also really like the second one, which shows the same bird hanging casually from a small branch by one foot, while using the other to manipulate a peanut it had carried up from the bird table. Watching it hanging right by the hide window, unfazed by my presence or the noise of the camera as it calmly ate its prize, I was just about as charmed as I think I’ve ever been.
R: L2, C3, D26.
