Its nest is a wonderful specimen of bird-architecture. The little birds work industriously, and at the end of fifteen days the beautiful home is finished and ready to receive the small speckled eggs. The nest is fastened to twigs covered with thick foliage, and a location near a small water-course is usually selected. It is shaped like a large egg. The little round door is at one side near the top, and some nests have been found with a similar opening on the other side, lower down. As the birds can not speak and explain this freak in the construction of their house, the reason has never been found out. Some naturalists think it is for better ventilation.
To weave its nest the bird collects bits of wood, soft moss, and the strong silken winding of certain cocoons, which it twists together in thick impenetrable walls, within which its little ones may lie secure from rain and storm and cold. The exterior of the nest is artistically covered with beautiful lichens and bits of soft bark, which make it in color and outward texture so much like the branches to which it is secured that a very sharp eye is needed to distinguish it.
When the little house is complete, it is furnished with a soft thick bed of downy feathers, and the mother begins to brood over seven or eight little rose-white eggs delicately specked with red.
These long-tailed titmice are the most faithful of all bird-parents. They keep their children near them until they are a year old, and as two broods are born during the warm weather, with seven or eight in each brood, a whole titmouse family—papa, mamma, and as many as sixteen little ones—may often be seen hopping about together and scouring the hedges in search of food.
They are ravenous little creatures, and always hunting from morning till night, and as they are very sociable, they go in large flocks, twittering and chirping gleefully as they spy a swarm of fat flies, or discover among old stone heaps or in the bark of trees the hiding-places where tiny worms are lying asleep in a chrysalis shroud. They will also eat beech-nuts, acorns, hemp, and other oily seeds.
English boys call these birds tomtits, and consider them the most impertinent of all the feathered inhabitants of the country; for small and graceful as they are, there are few birds which possess such a violent temper or such cruel instincts. They will fight furiously with each other for the possession of a plump insect or some other dainty morsel, and—sad to relate—they show no mercy toward a poor wounded or sick bird. No matter whether it is one of their own kind or of some other species, the titmice set upon it and kill it with sharp blows from their strong little beaks. When it is dead, they pick open its skull and eat its brains.
In France titmice are often captured in snares, but unless the specimen is very young, it will make a savage attack on the hands of the hunter who takes it from the net. It is not difficult to tame them. They make very wise and amusing pets, and if allowed to fly about will quickly clear a room of flies and mosquitoes. But they should never be put in a cage with other birds, for they will harass and worry them to death.
Titmice are very useful inhabitants of gardens and orchards, as they wage continual war on all kinds of saw-flies and other small insects, which do much injury to fruit-bearing trees and shrubs, and a wise gardener will allow the saucy tomtit full liberty to hop and jump about in search of a breakfast for himself and his numerous family.
In the United States ten varieties of titmice have been found, and there are no doubt more. The most familiar among them is the chickadee, which may be heard any sunny day during our long northern winter trilling its merry chickadee-dee-dee in the fields and woods. It is one of the few birds that remain with us during the entire year, and is always the same lively, blithe little creature.