Watch this pair of long-tailed tits as they put the final touches to their soft, expandable nest. This bird species has multiple chicks and so there needs to be room for the young as they grow.
Long-tailed tits are common British garden birds. They begin pairing up in late January and by Valentine’s Day many of them have already begun nesting. Their nests are woven from lichen, moss or sheep’s wool and stitched together using cobwebs which stretch as the chicks inside grow up. These birds tits have round bodies covered in pink fluffy feathers and long black tails. It is this long tail that helps easily distinguish this species from others.
They are very active birds and flit from branch to branch, rarely staying still for more than a second, so that it can be hard at first to spot them. But their noisy, sociable calls usually give them away and it didn’t take me long before I found this pair flying up and then down the length of my garden hedge. I followed the line of this hawthorn until I found their nest, hidden in a nearby berberis shrub. The delicate shade of their pink feathers complemented the deep purple of leaves of the berberis. Even the brown pheasant feathers they carried in their beaks to line their nest with were perfectly matched.
