Blue Tit with Sound 13cm - Soft Toy

Physical Characteristics
The azure blue crown and dark blue line passing through the eye and encircling the white cheeks to the chin give the Blue Tit a very distinctive appearance. The forehead and a bar on the wing are white. The nape, wings and tail are blue; the back is yellowish green; the under parts mostly sulphur-yellow with a dark line down the abdomen. The bill is black, the legs bluish grey and the irides dark brown. Young Blue Tits are noticeably more yellow.

Habitat
A common woodland and garden bird, also seen along hedgerows and in most places with trees and bushes. It is a widespread and common resident breeder throughout temperate and subarctic Europe and Western Asia in deciduous or mixed woodlands. It is a resident bird and does not migrate.

Behaviour
Blue and Great Tits form mixed winter flocks and the former are perhaps the better gymnasts in the slender twigs. A Blue Tit will often ascend a trunk in short jerky hops, imitating a Treecreeper. As a rule the bird roosts in ivy or evergreens, but in hard weather will shelter in a hole. Blue tits are very agile and can hang from almost anywhere. The Blue Tit has an average life expectancy of 1.5 years.

Breeding
The Blue Tit will nest in any suitable hole in a tree, wall, or stump, or an artificial nest box, often competing with House Sparrows or Great Tits for the site. Few birds more readily accept the shelter of a nesting box; the same hole is returned to year after year, and when one pair dies another takes possession. The bird is a close nest sitter, hissing and biting at an intruding finger. In the South West of England such behaviour has earned the Blue Tit the colloquial nick-name "Little Billy Biter". When protecting its eggs it raises its crest, but this is a sign of excitement rather than anger, for it is also elevated during nuptial display. The nesting material is usually moss, wool, hair and feathers, and the eggs are laid in April or May. The number in the clutch is often very large, but seven or eight are normal and bigger clutches are usually laid by two or even more hens.

Diet
The Blue Tit is a valuable destroyer and eater of insect pests, though it has not an entirely clean sheet as a beneficial species. It is fond of young buds of various trees and may pull them to bits in the hope of finding insects.

Strange and Interesting Facts
An interesting example of culturally transmitted learning in birds was the phenomenon dating from the 1960s, of Blue Tits teaching one another how to open traditional British milk bottles with foil tops to get at the cream underneath. This behaviour has declined recently because of the trend toward buying lower fat milk, and the replacement of doorstep delivery by supermarket purchases of milk.