Titty Tuesday: more tits!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the week! I am here to make it better by introducing you to some of the world’s greatest tits.

First up, the smallest Tit: Coal Tits!

Image credit: Sheila Sargeant. This Coal Tit was photographed eating a worm while perched on a blackthorn in her garden

Itty Bitty Community, rise up! :D There’s nothing wrong with being small <3

The Tit family of birds are not generally super big in the first place. But these little black birds are the smallest of the lot, and measure around 10cm in length.

Anyway, the Coal Tit has blueish-black head, throat and neck feathers, and have adorable white cheeks.

Coal Tits are known to nest in holes in the ground often choosing the burrows that mice have made and then abandoned.

Like squirrels, Coat Tits have been recorded stashing their food (mostly seeds such as sunflower seeds) in preparation for winter! And just like squirrels, Coat Tits often forget where they have stashed their food, which results in seeds germinating in strange places.

Nature’s very own seed distributor!

However, I guess sometimes in nature, size does matter. Apparently, the poor little Coat Tit does get bullied by other birds: the much larger, and sometimes rough and violent, Great Tits have been recorded capitalising on the Coal Tit’s stash of food by RAIDING IT and stealing their supply! :(

(Pick on someone your own size!)

Here’s a handy illustration of the different Tits in the family. You can see from this illustration that the Coal Tit is the smallest in the group.

Fake titties: Long-Tailed Tits

One of the favourite ‘tits’ to visit British gardens is the delicate Long-Tailed Tit. However, despite their name, these birds are not really part of the tit family at all. Instead, they are more closely related to several species of BABBLERS in Asia.

Sometimes, birds are given inaccurate names by the scientists who first spotted and studied them. In the past, bird scientists didn’t have easy access to genetic science and data. They’d name birds based on how they appeared, and not their genetic makeup.

Because the Long-tailed Tit looked and behaved like typical tits, it was automatically assumed they’d fit in this category.

In fact, I’ll include photos of some other tits VS babblers. You may notice that the Long-tailed Tits look more like the Great Tit, rather than the (closely related) Golden Babbler.

Image credit: HBW Alive. This is a Great Tit

Image credit: eBird. This is a Golden Babbler, which does not seem to resemble the Long-tailed Tit. However, at least its long tail matches the Long-tailed Tit’s tail!

But, like tits, these are small, loveable birds that are extremely sociable. For those lucky enough to live in Britain and have their own garden, the Long-tailed Tits are regulars to a well-maintained garden. They appear in seemingly-hyperactive flocks as they rarely remain still.

It is impossible to not love Long-Tailed Tits. They are incredibly pretty and delicate, and with the long black and white tail, these tits are easily distinguishable. They have a pale underbelly, and a black, white and pink back.

And did you know? Old English names for the Long-tailed Tit include: Long-tailed Pie, Mumruffin, Bottle Tit, Bum Barrel, Bum Towel, Oven Bird, Bag and Hedge Jug to name a few!

A fetish: Japanese Tits…

It pained me to type the sentence above! Before we learn about these birds (really cool fun facts about them coming up) I wanted to share that in my opinion, there’s a difference between having a “type” and having a “fetish”, with the former being somewhat harmless and the latter being quite harmful!

Fetishisation can be thought of as the act of making someone an object of sexual desire based on some aspect of their identity. It’s not so much that someone has a “type” for Asian women, but rather, they’ve reduced all Asian women into a caricature - and what they’re into is this caricature and not actually the individual person in front of them.

But anyway, back to birds…

The Japanese Tit, also known as the Oriental Tit, is a cute little bird that can be found Japan and the Russian Far East beyond the Amur River. However, until recently, this species didn’t EXIST!! Well, sort of.

Image credit: Peter Rowland. This is a Japanese Tit, which looks identical to a Great Tit

Until 2016, only the Great Tit existed. However, after some cool genetic testing and blah blah that you guys aren’t interested in, scientists found that the Japanese Tit should be classified as a whole new species, called the Japanese Tit.

The reason why that’s interesting (to me, anyway) is that to the human eye, the Great Tit and the Japanese Tit looked identical and behaved + sang in an almost identical manner - making scientists think that, well, they are the same bird!

However, among the birds I guess, Japanese Tits and Great Tits are as different as night and day, and they do not mate with each other. This is even though they look and behave virtually the same to each other. So in bird world, there must be something that they can see that differentiates these two species apart.

There may be hundreds, if not thousands, of other stories like this - of birds that we humans classify as the same species because they look the same, but in reality, are different to each other!

How did these birds get their name?

Before we end the article, I guess we should address the elephant in the room: their lovely names!

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.

And they are small birds indeed!

That’s all for today. See you guys next time!