Moving In

Over the past few days I have noticed a pair of great tits inspecting a desirable, detached residence in my garden. This interest seems to have annoyed the local house sparrows, after seemingly finding the door too narrow in the past, they have now started peering in and standing on the roof!. However, the great tits stood their ground and having completed an internal survey have decided to move in.

Today, I have been watching them carry beakfuls of green moss into the nestbox attached to the trunk of a gingko tree. I then started to wonder if this chore was a shared responsibility which gave me the task of differentiating between the male and female. The greens and yellow of the male are brighter and he has a much broader, black breast stripe that becomes even wider between the legs.

Having established this, it soon became evident that this was an unequal distribution of labour. It was always the female that repeatedly appeared, perching on an adjacent branch, to check the coast was clear before disappearing into the box with the cosy moss in her bill. This is not to say that the male was completely redundant. He appeared to be taking a more supervisory role with occasional ‘teach-er, teach-er’ calls from nearby vantage points perhaps to announce his territory or as an encouragement to the female’s efforts. In addition, I did see him on a couple of occasions with food/grub in his bill and the female nearby but despite carrying the tit-bit from branch to branch and sometimes approaching close to the nest box he ended up eating it himself. The romantic in me thought that these might be signals to the female that he would be able to provide for their forthcoming offspring!

By late afternoon the cargoes of moss had stopped. Not that the woman’s work was done, merely that the base of the nest had been completed and now the material that was being transported to the box had changed. I am not sure what it was but it was white in colour and looked like fine fur or hair, it was obvious that the nest was being lined. Once again frequent trips ensued with one ball of soft hair so large that I imagined it obscuring her vision in flight. All this hard work was interspersed with stop offs to my seed feeder for refuelling and of course the male joined in.

Later, whether through tiredness or that the job was completed the birds disappeared. I will certainly be monitoring future events with interest.                            

p.s.   The house sparrows obviously have different domestic arrangements as over the past couple of days I have frequently seen a male stripping the soft lining from a hanging basket outside the back door and flying back to next door’s box!  But then its Latin name is Passer domesticus!