Great Tit
A common and easily recognised garden bird, the Great Tit will use bird boxes and garden feeders and is widespread in Britain apart from some of the Scottish islands.
As its name suggests, the great tit is our largest tit species. It is, in fact, the most widespread of all tit species and can be found as far away as Japan, Indonesia and North Africa in varied subspecies.
The national population in Britain is estimated at more than two million birds.
By nature a woodland bird, the great tit has adapted well to gardens and parks. Its cheery "teacher-teacher" call is particularly noticeable on sunny days in late winter as a harbinger of spring.
They have a black head and chin, white cheeks and a yellow breast. They can be confused with the similar coal tit, but are much more brightly coloured and larger, with a distinctive black stripe down their yellow breasts to their underparts. This stripe is the best way to tell apart males and females: the male’s stripe is broader, especially on the belly, and the female’s does not reach as far as the legs.
Great tits live about three years in the wild, but have reached over 13 years in captivity. Their population has increased in Britain since the 1970s - probably due to their use of bird feeders and bird boxes (which need a slightly bigger hole than is used for blue tits). In fact, it has been discovered that British birds have evolved longer beaks in the last 40 years - presumed to be an adaptation to bird feeders!
Great tits appear to be intelligent with the ability to solve problems with insight learning, that is to solve a problem through insight rather than trial and error.
In Britain, great tits (along with blue tits) learned to break the foil caps of milk bottles delivered on the doorstep of homes to obtain the cream at the top from 1921. This behaviour spread rapidly in the next two decades and finally died out with the partial death of the daily milk delivery. Great tits have also been recorded using tools, using a conifer needle in the bill to extract larvae from a hole in a tree.
Great tits also proved intelligent in an experiement where nuts and other desirable food was suspended from a string. Most birds tried to get the food from the wing, but the great tit was smart enough to stand on the branch above and pull the string up to them.
Great tits are most common in gardens in December.
Further reading
Links to external websites are not maintained by Bite Sized Britain. They are provided to give users access to additional information. Bite Sized Britain is not responsible for the content of these external websites.