Before I start this post let me just explain the significance of the yellow cheeks to everybody who doesn’t know or have the Eurasian Blue Tit locally (most of the world really)
In the UK the Blue Tit is a common garden bird. Very neat and tidy it is a pretty little thing much loved for it’s acrobatics on the bird feeder.
It looks like this.
No it doesn’t really (not all the time) I’m just joking with you.
This is an adult blue tit.
Newly fledged birds have yellow cheeks.
Blue Tits have a large brood, it can be as many as fifteen but eight to ten is more common. They take a lot of feeding, each little bird needs about a hundred caterpillars a day, so the parents are kept very busy. They have to find all that food on top of looking after themselves. A wet Spring can be devastating for Blue Tits, they only have one brood and if it rains at the wrong time they can’t find enough insect food and the chicks die.
We have had a very wet Spring this year and so I have been watching the feeder for a couple of weeks now looking out for those little yellow cheeks.
Fed up with fetching home an extra thousand caterpillars a day the parent birds are very keen to bring their young to the feeder and teach them how to get their own dinner.
You have to get it through to them that this isn’t just a place where you come to be fed now that you are an adult. This is a place where you come to feed yourself!
There are no more free lunches.
So this is what you do. You pick the food up… Wait……Then you put it in your mouth and you swallow it!
Okay?
One more time. How hard can it be? Pick it up and eat it!
You’re on your own.
What are we supposed to do? Did you follow any of that?
Hello Baby. I am so glad to see that you made it. It is going to be a long hot summer now and you will soon get the hang of it.
A Tramp in the Woods 