coal tit

Not only is he walking face-first down the wall. He's almost got the nose-up pose right too.

Running late. Well ... not running. Took a lo-o-o-ng hike today, so just sitting now. But late browsing and posting. So I figured I'd post my Saturday Fun Shots even thought it's still Friday (barely). Most of you won't see these until Saturday anyway. Hope you have fun with them.

Once he decided to keep one, he also kept coming back for more.

I posted a Great Tit perching on another of the antlers a few days back and Stanley Jones commented that it was clearly a popular spot for waiting ones turn. Today's antler-tip is even more popular, as witness all those white blotches ;)

Just the right height for tits, though. That day we saw almost only Coal Tits at the feeder.

Finally grabbing a seed for keeps ... maybe.

Coalie giving me one of those looks, I guess because I was laughing at him for dropping so many seeds ;)

Again. I saw a lot of these through the Fall. I'll try to spread them out over the coming weeks so as not to bore you ... except when they make a Saturday fun set. And I'll try not to mix them up with their cousins again. Not even the upside-down shots.

sometimes i get them... only remaining for a second on the perch

They are soooo... fast. not so easy to catch them

The holidays are playing tricks on my sense of time. I thought it was Saturday and had these three lined up as fun shots. So you get two fun days in a row. I have others for tomorrow. My apologies on the ID of the other two in this set. Bru B was quite right. They're Willow Tits, not Coal Tits...

Coal Tit peeping thru the trellis!

Just in case you doubted that I was actually observing a repeated behavior, here's another capture of a coalie dropping a seed. Sometimes they even flick them away with a toss of the head, but that was harder to capture. The straight drops were so frequent that I caught quite a few just by...

Is that the problem, that the seeds slip out of their grip, maybe because they're trying for more than one at a time? This little guy just dropped one and seems to be losing the next one as well.

Has anybody else noticed this behavior? My Mom used a seed mix in her feeder and noted that the birds at the feeder tended to toss certain types of seeds "overboard" and that others again (for instance, the towhees) fed on those toss-outs down on the ground. But this feeder is filled...

I think this coalie is a baseball fan ;)

Well Peeps, We're on the road again this morning...We are making the journey home to Hastings with Lynsey & Dan in the car. We have to get home, as we are babysitting the two wee granddaughters from Southampton tonight and tomorrow night. Catch up with y'all later.

Three from the garden here in Lakenheath...I hope y'all have a "Good Un".

One of our smallest of the Tit family in Britain

Just love to get a decent shot of these lovely little birds but have to be lucky since they don't hang around for long

Young Coalie...posing in the garden.

Another shot I think I promised Delia. I'm not sure if the Coalies and Willow Tits do this on purpose, or if it's just that they lose their grip on the seeds. They do also come back for the dropped ones on the ground. So do the squirrels and the Bullfinches.

Coalie...posing in the garden.