Bearded Tits Do it Again

Spent a wonderful two hours this morning watching a pair of Bearded Tits feeding their well grown young in one of our reed wigwam nest boxes at Leighton Moss RSPB Reserve. The weather was fine when I set out but it started to rain  and the change in behavior was interesting. Despite the young being well  feathered and  ca three days off fledging, and in the nest box they are completely sheltered from the rain, the adults still spent quite some time brooding once the rain started.. Most natural nest sites are open to the weather so they  would need to provide some cover in these circumstances. What an advantage in this cold spring these nest boxes must be! The adults had no problems finding food, the reed bed was alive with flying insects.

My main reason for watching was to obtain the colour ring combinations of the adults as part of our long running population study on this fascinating species. The female was no problem, orange over red on the left leg and orange over BTO ring on the right. The male also had orange over BTO on the right and I eventually got the left leg combinations purple over yellow.

When I got back home, my data base revealed that they had both been ringed as juveniles in 2011, both were sighted on the grit trays on many occasions in the autumn of 2011 but never together.  However in the 2012 autumn they were seen together acting as a pair on 15 occasions between  28th September and 21 November. A phone call to Alan Gallagher and he e-mailed the attached picture of these two birds together, one of five photos he had taken in early November 2012 on the grit trays. Another case of birds staying in pairs throughout the autumn and winter.

The RSPB have a Web camera on this nest  so you can watch the action on the Leighton Moss Web Site.
John