Blue Tit
Cyanistes caeruleus
Print fact sheet (PDF)
Blue cap, yellow breast, no fear of anything — the acrobat of every feeder in town.
Small, bright and instantly recognisable: a sky-blue crown, wings and tail, white cheeks with a dark eye-stripe, and a lemon-yellow underside. Blue tits are in every Dumfries garden, park and patch of woodland, and are usually the first birds to find a new feeder. They nest readily in boxes, and a single pair may raise eight or ten young in one go, timed to the caterpillar flush on nearby oaks.
Behaviour
Blue tits feed acrobatically, hanging upside down from the thinnest twigs to reach aphids and caterpillars other birds cannot get at. Outside the breeding season they join roving mixed flocks with great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits and goldcrests, moving through woodland together — if you find one, you usually find all of them. They will hammer a sunflower heart open by holding it under one foot.
When to see it
Quick facts
- Family
- Tits (Paridae)
- Size
- 11.5 cm · smaller than a sparrow
- UK status
- Green-listed
Photo by Francis Franklin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons