Great tits will take over the world. You see my problem already – it’s the name. Unless you can disassociate from the Carry On innuendo of “tit”, this bird is always going to be a joke. It supposedly gets its name from titmouse: in Old English, tit means small and “mouse” is a corruption of māse, a bird name of Germanic origins.
There is a theatrical prettiness about great tits: the shiny black head with flashing white cheeks, flamboyantly dapper, green-backed, yellow-breasted, with black tie and cleavage stripe. Their twin-syllabic song sounds like a drunk pushing a rusty wheelbarrow. But the music hall stage persona ends there.
Their pert, quick, neatness of form obscures a fierce nature. Watch them on the arena of a bird table: they’re tough, uncompromising scrappers, and you get the impression they’re in it for the fight as much as the food. Before the breeding season they join forces with blue tits and coal tits to become the muscle for a painted warrior cult, knocking other passerines off their perches. There are stories about them eating hibernating bats alive.
Great tits are greenwood birds, ruling the treetops where the sparrowhawks can’t get them, but they have become very successful colonists, occupying the parks and gardens we provided for them and, by charisma, flashy acrobatics and a naughty name, endearing themselves to those who hang fat balls (there’s the problem again).
Great tits have learned to thrive where the populations of many other bird species have collapsed. They have been adapting to climate change, laying eggs two weeks earlier to take advantage of milder weather and the peak in caterpillar numbers feeding on earlier leaves. They can lay 12 eggs and have two broods, although many of them are the results of cuckoldery: sexual politics in great tit society is complicated and controlled secretly by the females.
Since the 1960s, the great tit population has doubled. They range throughout Europe, north Asia to north Africa, and are becoming a global power.
Parus major just means great tit, shortened from titmouse: a great small. Of the smalls this is the greatest, despite, or perhaps because of, its ridiculous name.
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