Things you need to know about LONG TAILED TITS!

Long-Tailed tits are one of the favourite garden birds in the UK. In this video you will find all about them, their diet, what they sound like, where they live and many more interesting long tailed tit facts.
The long tailed tit has a perfectly suitable name, their 7 to 9cm tail does make up more than half their body length. They have a wingspan of around 18cm and are surprisingly light at just 7 to 10 grams in weight. There are several races of this species, each with varying amounts of black and white on their heads and faces, they also have a pink band along their shoulders, pied markings down their wings and very pale pink or white undersides.
Throughout most of the year their diet is almost entirely based on invertebrates. They seem to have a special taste for spiders, aphids and caterpillars but in the winter they will also feed on berries, seeds and nuts and they can sometimes be seen visiting garden bird feeders.
Long tailed tits usually start nesting from one year of age when a pair will form from early February onwards and begin the construction of a very unique dome shaped nest. This can take more than 3 weeks to build and is made out of moss and lichen woven together wit spiders webs. Because of this, the nest itself can expand and stretch as they chicks grow inside it, but just to make it even more comfortable, the parents then line it with hundreds and sometimes thousands of feathers. In fact, a Victorian ornithologist with far too much time on his hands once counted the feathers in a long tailed tits nest to find a whopping 2379 of them. Well, everyone’s got to have a hobby.
The female will lay between 6 and 14 peanut sized white eggs with brown speckles. The female incubates them alone for 14 to 18 days whilst the male brings food to her in the nest. Because of the shape of their nests I couldn’t find any footage of the chicks developing inside but after 16 to 17 days they are ready to fledge and leave the nest. The chicks continue to be fed by their parents after this point for several weeks and will often stay with their family group throughout the rest of the year and into the next nesting season, sometimes helping their parents to rear their next batch of chicks. But it is not just related birds that help each other, long tailed tit nests in the UK have less than 20% chance of success and depending when the nest fails, the parents have a couple of choices. If the nest fails early into the season the pair can build a second nest, albeit sometimes a less structurally complete one, and try to rear a second clutch of eggs but if the nest fails later in the year, they may do something quite unusual. The adult birds may go and find another long tailed tit nest and help that pair to rear their chicks. One study found that almost half of all long tailed tit nests have non parent helpers and it isn’t all one sided. Birds that help others to rear their chicks have been shown to have a higher survival rate into the following nesting season and are also more likely to be successful at rearing their own chicks the next time round.
They live on average for 2 to 3 years with the oldest known bird being recorded at 8 years and 11 months of age from being ringed.
#gardenbirds #birdwatching #britishbirds
Some of the footage and images used in this video were obtained using creative commons licences, the originals and their licence details can be found at:
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