Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 29

COAL TITS, LIKE the blue tits and great tits, have now started singing their spring song. This is a more high-pitched, liquid-sounding version of the great tit’s ‘teacher, teacher’ song, and is usually delivered more rapidly. A variant, with a repeated phrase of three short notes, can also be heard. The coal tits often sing from high in a fir or redwood tree. In parks and woodland where they are common, they answer one another: each bird is warning its neighbours to keep out of its territory. They are small, restless birds, with a black cap and a noticeable white nape.

Long-tailed tits are still going round in flocks but these will soon be breaking up and the pairs will be looking for nest sites in gorse and hawthorn bushes. Unlike the other common titmice, long-tailed tits have no spring song, though a rapid, bubbling repetition of their squeaking and churring notes has been recorded.

Long-tailed tits use lichens to camouflage their domed nests. These strange crusts that appear on trees and stones are formed from an alliance of fungi and algae. They thrive in the sunlight in winter, when there are no leaves to cast their shadows on them.