I have seen these adorable little birds a few times, in small groups (they are highly sociable), once at a distance in Norfolk and once, fleetingly, locally. They are not uncommon but they never sit still for long, generally not more than a second. Collins Bird Guide describes them as restless. I had never seen them in the garden until just the other day and had long since decided they were nigh on impossible to photograph. But somehow I managed it (mostly luck). I was chuffed to bits.
The image at the head of the post is from Henry Leonard Meyer’s Illustrations of British Birds, first published in parts destined for two or four folio volumes, c.1835-1844. Meyer was himself the artist with help from his family. The plates are lithographed and coloured by hand. Copies of this and the later seven volume octavo edition are available for four-figure sums. The copy from which the illustration was taken is the digitised version of that at the Smithsonian Museum. A small armorial book-label indicates that it was bound for Mark Rolle.
Originally Mark Trefusis, he inherited the vast estates of his uncle by marriage and assumed the arms and name by royal licence.
I used an illustration from John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain, published between 1862 and 1873. in this post:
Falcons and falconry – Animal Wild
Here are the Long-tailed Tits from that work:
I prefer the Meyer I have to say. Here are Peregrine Falcons from Meyer and Gould side by side for comparison:
I seem to have been down a fair few rabbit-holes researching this post. One was to do with noticing that the letter “y” in Meyer’s name on the original title page carried an umlaut. I hadn’t seen this before and knew only that it wasn’t German. It took more googling than I expected to learn that it was Dutch. And indeed the author was Dutch-born. His work is extraordinarily comprehensive and no two copies of the first edition are the same in terms of the plates included. Unfortunately publication sparked a craze for the destructive practice of egg-collecting in the UK. Some of the eggs depicted were added to the printed plates in watercolour.
“ÿ” is found in a few French proper names and is largely out of use in Dutch now, being replaced with “ij”. It is also seen in the indigenous North American language Tlingit. The Latin alphabet has 26 letters, 21 consonants and five vowels, or 20 and six, depending on whether “y” is used as one or the other, from the 22 letter Phoenician alphabet via the Greek alphabet which added vowels. “J”, “u” and “w” were only introduced to the English alphabet in the Middle Ages. We say “double you” whereas the French have the equivalent of “double vee”. “W” and “k” were very late to French – the first is uncommon and the second only appears in foreign words. The German alphabet has the same 26 letters, plus three vowels taking umlauts, and “ß”. Italian runs to just 21 letters, sixteen consonants and five vowels (my old boss and eternal grammarian taught me to spell out numbers up to and including twenty), Latvian has 33, Spanish and Estonian 27, Cyrillic 33. It fascinates me.
From one rabbit-hole to the next. I noticed that the caption of Meyer’s birds read “Long-tailed Titmouse”. In this post:
Books about Bird Names – Animal Wild
I took from The Bird Name Book, Princeton University Press, 2022, by wildlife guide Susan Myers:
Known as titmice or actually titmouses in earlier times, the word “tit” “came into English in the 1500s from the Icelandic tittr, the Norwegian tita ot the Swedish tätt“, all of which simply indicated something small. There is no connection with the word for a woman’s breast which has an entirely different etymology. It is “titmouses” not “titmice” because the “mouse” part is from the Anglo-Saxon mase from an Ancient Greek word for “small”.
Gould notes that Long-tailed Tits were often called Bottle-Tits and Charles Swainson in his The Folk Lore and Provincial Names of British Birds, 1866, gives a variety of alternatives such as mumruffin and, bizzarely, bum towel. At this point I am one step away from delving into the taxonomy. The more I researched that, the more confused I became. Collins says that they are not closely related to the “true” tits but are members of the same group which includes warblers, swallows and larks and has them on the same page as the Bearded Tit / Reedling and the Penduline Tit. “Tit” was clearly a pretty generic name for a bird. It is quite the minefield. The Latin nomenclature is Aegithalos caudatus. Meyer has Parus caudatus from Linnaeus – Paridae is basically the tit family. Gould has Mecistura caudatus and I have also seen Acredula rosea. So there have been some major changes as our understanding has grown. I have tried pretty hard but have not come up with very much in terms of when or why. There are various subspecies too and hybrids.
They employ a co-operative breeding strategy – younger birds help breeding pairs to raise chicks.
All of that aside, I am delighted by their visit and cannot wait to see them here again.
This is from my earlier post:
Avian Architecture. Book review. Part II – Animal Wild
Long-tailed Tits’ (apparently not actually a member of the tit family, like the Bearded Tit, which I have renamed before, the “Moustachioed Reedling”) nests are famously intricate, using moss and silk which work together like velcro. The numbers are astonishing: approximately “3,000 lichen flakes, 600 or more silk spider egg cocoons, 200-300 sprigs of moss and about 1,500 feathers”. I am sure I once read somewhere that we humans would not be able to construct such a thing if we wanted to.
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