This is a long-tailed tit.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, you don’t want to learn any more about this bird, because, surely you will find out that this bird isn’t quite as nice as they seem! It always turns out that way with the really cute birds doesn’t it! Like, robins, who doesn’t love robins!
The sweet song of a robin will make any sad day a happy one:
https://xeno-canto.org/1053664
But, it’s important to understand what this beautiful song is. It’s basically the robin yelling at the other robins to get off their damn lawn. Sure, robin song can be a male robin trying to win the heart of a female robin, but this recording took place in November, so a song warning the other robins to stay away is the most likely explanation.
Have you ever noticed that robins sing more often than other birds? Well, that’s because they are so territorial that they very rarely stop shouting, “You’d better stay away or there’ll be trouble!”
So, the uplifting song of a robin, when put into context, is a really angry, aggressive song. That doesn’t mean you can, or should, try to alter that feeling of joy it gives you when you hear it, but, any illusions that the robin is singing to bring happiness to the heart of everyone on Earth or to end war or something need to be shattered.
What about mallards? Us Corkonians have been feeding mallards in the Lough since before we learned to speak, and many other places have a lake or river where people can go to feed the mallards. Surely nothing bad can be said about mallards?
Here’s a recording I took of at least two mallards quacking in unison. A sound from countless childhoods.
https://xeno-canto.org/1067711
But, here’s a recording that’ll give you a different perspective on male mallards. This recording was taken by Sean Ronáyne. I’d highly recommend checking out Sean’s recordings on Xeno Canto, which are under the name “Irish Wildlife Sounds”, indeed I had to resist spending an hour or so listening to his recordings so that I could finish this blogpost! So this is the recording:
It’s the sound of at least twenty male mallards pursuing a female. After spending countless childhood hours in the Lough, it certainly was a bit unsettling to learn that male mallards are so violent. Indeed I witnessed an incident when a group of male mallards descended on a female mallard and I was worried they were going to drown her, fortunately she survived the ordeal. So yeah, watching mallards swimming in the local lake may be a calm, tranquil experience, but have no illusions, male mallards are not the kind, friendly birds that our childhood memories would lead us to think they are.
Black-Headed Gulls are so cute! Surely they’re lovely and hate war?
Guess again!:
This was an incident I witnessed of two black headed gulls fighting, indeed I was worried one was going to drown the other. But fortunately, they seemed to resolve their differences and calm down.
So, nature isn’t always, and can’t always be, just animals sitting around being happy and joyful and joyfully happy. Some really bad stuff happens, and has to happen. It makes me sad every time I think of how the sparrowhawk kills sentient creatures who have pain receptors. And yet, if it was in my power to stop the sparrowhawk, I would not, because I would be sentencing every sparrowhawk to the horrific fate of starving to death.
Here’s a picture of one of my favourite birds, a buzzard, eating something:
To me a photo like this is quite bittersweet. I’m so happy for the buzzard, finding a good meal and getting to live another day. But, while I don’t know what the buzzard is eating, I can tell you it ain’t lettuce. I’m happy for this buzzard that got to live, but sad for whatever animal had to die.
Nature is under no obligation to be nice. It can be very cruel, as well as very beautiful. But don’t worry, what I’m going to talk about today is an example of something, a behaviour of long tailed tits, that I find to be quite beautiful.
Long Tailed Tits And Caring For The Young
My conclusion that long tailed tits are such lovely birds, not just based on their appearance, but based on their behaviour, comes from this article, and this paper, which cite studies of long-tailed tit behaviour over the course of thirty years:
https://theconversation.com/for-long-tailed-tits-it-really-does-take-a-village-256128
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.14237
The fact that there is such curiosity and drive to understand our fellow sentient creatures that there would be a thirty year study on them really gives me hope for the future. That means this study lasted for three quarters of my life!
Incidentally, have you noticed even long-tailed tit nests are cute?
For animals worried about how they will get their next meal, the eggs of the long-tailed tit represent an easy option. Consequently, many long-tailed tits end up losing all of the eggs in their nest to a hungry animal. Such a sad thing to happen, and one of two things will happen next. If it’s early enough in the season, a long-tailed tit pair will try for another brood. However, if it’s too late in the season for that, a long-tailed tit pair will help their relatives, or sometimes birds that are complete strangers to them, to raise their brood.
So a pair of long-tailed tits who are struggling to raise their young, might be joined by one or more birds who lost their own brood. So extended families can often become a part of the process of raising the young.
Why long-tailed tits help raise young birds that they aren’t related to is less clear, but it has been theorized that they simply mistake unrelated birds for relatives.
I only very recently learned this very interesting, and heartwarming, fact about long-tailed tits. This silver lining in the sadness of a whole brood being lost, that another brood will get more help, and more support, in the crucial beginning stages of their lives. It made me wish to go out and seek more photos, and more recordings of long-tailed tits, like this photo that is mostly tail:
Like the blue tit and the great tit, getting photos of long-tailed tits is extremely difficult, as they hop from branch to branch at an extremely fast rate. Indeed more often than not I don’t have the energy to get photos of tit birds, they zip from branch to branch so fast I’m worried attempts to get photos will leave me with carpal tunnel syndrome in my arms, and not clear photos, but blurry messes. Though learning about long-tailed tits and their strong desire to take care of the baby birds in their population really increased my interest in the birds, resulting in my going to the effort of getting a lot more photos of them.
Also as a result of this, I’ve gotten much better at recognizing their calls. This means I can get more recordings of them, and also means I find them easier to find so I can get more photos. Its funny how when you get better at recognizing a bird’s calls, you realize they were probably all around you the whole time. For most of the time that I’ve been doing birding, I simply didn’t encounter that many long tailed tits. But now that I better understand what their calls sound like, I encounter them a lot. They were hiding in plain sight the whole time!:
Here are some recordings I took of long tailed tits.
As you can probably tell from the camera groan on this recording, I was simultaneously taking photos of the bird, hence the background noise. But this will hopefully give you a good idea of one of their sounds, it’s like a descending version of a wren’s rapid fire clicking.
https://xeno-canto.org/1080358
This recording contains both of the calls I most hear from these birds, both the “descending wren” sound, and the more high pitched sweet sound that they also make:
https://xeno-canto.org/1073133
I like the contrast between the two calls, the high pitched one sounds very soothing, while the “wren like” call has a much more urgent sound to it.
I spend quite a lot of time getting photos and recording of birds. But it’s not just the sights and sounds that interest me. It is, what is a day in the life of a bird? What do they like to do? What do they have to do? Indeed, some of my favourite photos are those that do reflect what birds actually get up to, such as the previous photo of black headed gulls fighting, or my numerous photos of various bird species mobbing buzzards.
And there is always something amazing about learning a new fact about the behaviour of birds. A few weeks ago, I didn’t even know that extended long-tailed tit families cared for their young, or sometimes helpers of a brood aren’t even related. It has given me a quite remarkable insight into these birds, these tiny little animals with giant tails!
Ponderings Of An Autist 