THE GREAT TITMOUSE.
Tits—together with a great number of tiny and beautiful gold-crested Wrens, that I have ever seen, or indeed can ever hope to see again. It was in a pine forest about twenty miles north of Gotha, the property of Hans Freiherr von Berlepsch, Germany’s most ardent bird protector. He was with us at the time and he said even he had never seen the like before, nor had his chief gamekeeper, who is himself an ornithologist. It was the more wonderful because we had walked for nearly three hours through the woods that morning and had seen, with this great exception, little wild life beyond an occasional black Squirrel and, through an avenue of pines from afar, a grand Buck feeding in a clearing. It was in the late autumn.
Nearly three thousand nesting-boxes have been fixed in the trees there, and it was about one of these, a deep one, that a number of Tits had appropriated as a warm and secure sleeping place for the autumn and winter, that the birds—three hundred of them at least the gamekeeper declared—had gathered; now pouncing down on it, a dozen of them at a time, now settling in noisy zi-zi-zi-ing parties on the high branches of pine round this centre. Perhaps, like Rooks that quarrel over a desirable nesting site, they were all eager to secure specially desirable sleeping quarters. Tits and Wrens do, of course, always go about the woods in parties, when family cares are over, but on such a scale as this rarely; and so many dainty Golden-Crested Wrens together might not be seen again in a life-time. All the species of the Tit family, excepting the Bearded and the Long-tailed Tit were there.
The amount of good these birds do among forest trees is incalculable, not to mention their greatly misunderstood labours in ridding the blossoms of our fruit trees of their infesting insect pests. Tits are, in fact, most energetic and active insect destroyers.
The Great Tit is a lively bird about the size of a Sparrow. The crown, neck, and throat black; cheeks white. A black stripe runs from the throat over the breast and under parts. The mantle is bright green; rump, tail, and wings plum colour, with oblique whitish stripes on the wings. The under side of the body is a beautiful bright yellow on either side of the black stripe. The short, strong beak is shaped like a grain of wheat and brown in colour; the strong legs are bluish. It builds its nest delicately, and usually in such hollow places as have a narrow opening, sometimes even in empty beehives. It lays six to nine—sometimes, though rarely, as many as fifteen—eggs, which are finely formed, of a pure white, with speckles of a beautiful rust colour.