Forgive my French: let’s look at some boobies and tits

We all love great tits and big brown boobies!

Meet the Great Tit.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room: their lovely name! Great Tits supposedly get their name from the word ‘titmouse’.

In Ye Olde English, “tit” means small. The worse “mouse” is a corruption of māse, a Germanic word for bird.

Image credit: Wikipedia. It is predominantly insectivorous in the summer, but will consume a wider range of food items in the winter months, including small hibernating bats!

By the way, I too am in possession of some Great… tidbits! About birds!

Jokes aside, the Great Tit is a fighter and survivor

Their tiny frames and adorable demeanor obscure their fierce nature. Watch them on their turf and you’ll be surprised by how tough and scrappy they are - they seem to like fighting almost as much as they like the food they fight over!

Image credit: Chris Toms. A Great Tit (bird on the right) fights with a Blue Tit (bird on the left) over some food.

In fact, there are records of Great Tits even eating hibernating bats alive: they’ll kill and eat the bats by pecking their heads open and feasting on their brains.

They know the value of teamwork, too. Before the breeding season starts, Great Tits will work with other Tit species (Blue Tits, Coal Tits and more) to become the ‘muscle’ of a bird cult. The Tit Cult knock other small birds off the perches that they want to inhabit. Once that’s done, the successful Tit Cult will have the nests of their dreams for breeding season!

Isn’t that neat?

Brown Boobies are sophisticated seabirds, thank you very much

First of all: Boobies don’t deserve their name.

The six species of Boobies (the blue-footed, red-footed, brown, Peruvian, Nazca, and masked) are thought to take their name from the Spanish word “bobo”, which means “stupid.”

Image credit: eBird. A big, beautiful pair of Brown Boobies.

That’s how early European colonists may have characterised these clumsy and unwary birds when they first saw them on land. However, Boobies, with their flippered feet and somewhat unbalanced bodies, are not built to walk on land, but to thrive at sea!

This seabird hunts by dive-bombing spectacularly from a height of up to 20 meters. They can’t really swim underwater, and mostly depend on deep dives in order to catch prey.

Want to see thousands of pairs of Brown Boobies? Look no further than nesting season in the Caribbean!

Image credit: Wondrous World Images. Brown boobies are ground nesters, gathering in colonies to build simple nests. They occupy the nest site year round and can breed at any time, laying one or two eggs and rearing only one chick.

They are gregarious breeders and will nests in huge colonies on rugged, difficult to access small oceanic islands. Some colonies can reach thousands of individuals if there’s enough food to sustain them all.

Brown Boobies will usually lay two eggs, but if one egg hatches first, the older and larger chick has a tendency of pushing the younger one out of the nest to its eventual death. This is so the older chick can hog all the parents’ love, care and resources to itself.

It sounds selfish, and I would never do that to my sister. (No really, I wouldn’t!)

There are as many as 7,000 breeding pairs on Christmas Island, one of the world’s largest populations of these impressive birds. Sounds like a party!

Image credit: Australian Geographic. Found on islands and coastlines throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, the brown booby is a highly adaptable bird, happy to nest on rocky cliffs or coral atolls when it’s not bobbing in the sea or cruising watchfully above it.

Blue-footed Boobies are aptly named

Okay, while these birds don’t deserve to be called ‘booby’ aka ‘dumb’, the Blue-footed Boobies definitely do deserve the first part of their name!

The males of this species take great pride in their fabulous feet, and during mating rituals, will strut their stuff! The bluer the feet, the more attractive the mate. And Blue-footed Boobies aren’t born blue - the brilliant colour only develops once they are sexually mature. (I love the mating rituals of birds. As a human, we don’t have anything as romantic as stomping our big blue feet around!)

Image credit: Minden Pictures. Blue-footed boobies on the Galápagos archipelago in Ecuador. The color of their feet is an important factor in mating.

While Blue-footed Boobies do use their webbed feet to swim (just like ducks and geese), they have a few other functions. Firstly, they use their large flippers to cover their young and keep them warm!

Unlike most birds, Blue-footed Boobies don’t have a ‘brooding patch’ to keep their eggs warm.

A brooding patch refers to an area on the bird’s underbelly that is featherless - shortly before a female lays eggs, her hormones tell the body to lose the feathers covering the brooding patch. So, once she lays her eggs, she has a soft patch of warm skin to use as an egg-warmer.

Penguins, pelicans and Blue-footed Boobies don’t have this brooding patch. Instead, a Blue-footed Booby will use their bright webbed feet for up to a month to keep their chicks warm after they’ve hatched from their eggs.

Image credit: Marko Dimitrijevic. A blue-footed booby with a chick.

And, like many seabirds, Brown Boobies and Blue-footed Boobies have a serrated, comb-like toenail on their middle toe called a “preen-claw.”

Boobies use this toenail to spread a unique waterproofing oil that they excrete from a gland in the tail throughout their feathers. Birds who live near the sea need to stay waterproof - if they fall into the water without sufficient waterproofing, their feathers would get waterlogged, and they would drown to their deaths. :(

Image credit: National Audubon Society. Among blue-footed boobies, female birds will fixate on the brilliant blue-ness of a partner’s feet!

There’s always that joke about how some women have such ginormous boobies that they’ll act as floatation devices should the women ever drown. In the case of the Boobies, they have their own way of staying waterproof and buoyant!

See you in my next newsletter - where we’ll look at some great big COCKS!