Long-Tailed Tit

The long-tailed tit’s diet consists of invertebrates such as insects. They quite like eating spiders, caterpillars and the eggs of butterflies and moths. While they prefer to eat invertabrates the species also eats fruits and seeds. This is more common when their usual food sources are scarce, such as during the winter.

Personally, I think long-tailed tit’s nests are absolutely adorable. Instead of using almost exclusively sticks like most birds, long-tailed tits use a larger variety of materials. When building their nests, they use feathers, lichen, spider silk and moss to create a large, soft nest that’s shaped like a cocoon with a hole near the top to go in and out through. These nests are assembled in trees where a branch forks, but can also be hidden low down in a bramble or gorse bush. Long-tailed tits breed around March and April, since their nests are so complex, nest building usually begins as early as February. Long-tailed tits are a monogamous species with breeding pairs forming lifelong bonds. Each pair works as a team to create their nest over the course of three weeks. Males find most of the materials for the nest and do a lot of the building, while the female shapes the nest and lines the interior. Females lay an average of 6-8 eggs and incubate them for around 16 days. Once hatched, the parents take care of their offspring for a further 16 days, at which point they fledge.