Educate Yourself About the Tufted Titmouse and Other Titmouses
Tufted Titmouse
The Tufted Titmouse has a plain head with a black forehead, and dark eyes, tufted crest, gray sparrow-sized body, rust-colored flanks, and a short broad tail. Its length is 6in (15cm) Its wingspan is 9in (24cm) Its voice is a song of a low, whistle and chant of “peter, peter, peter, or “here, here, here”, its calls are wheezy and nasal compared to those of chickadees. Their eggs are white or creamy with speckling at the larger end, and 1 clutch of 5-7 or (4-9) eggs. The females incubate for 13-14 days, and fledging time is 15-18 days. Both male and female feed their young. Males and females look alike.
The Tufted Titmouse is really fun to watch, just like the chickadee, and is almost as easy to hand-tame. You will soon find out that they can be some what of a hard customer to please. Once you have run out of seeds they will surely remind you with lots of whistling, the next time you come outside. The reason for its rather odd name comes from the Icelandic word “tit”, witch means small, and mouse witch is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon word “mase”, witch means a “kind of bird”.
The Tufted Titmouse is a very energetic forest bird witch has adapted great to suburbs, and parks, especially ones with large oak and beech trees. They have expanded much further north recently, and the cause might be, of the amount of bird feeders around. The Titmouse is a very persistent bird, it will hold its favorite food (acorns and beechnuts), under its feet and peck for several minutes, until the shell cracks, and then feast on the juicy meat inside.
They also like to feed on caterpillars, and will extract the pupae from developing moth cocoons. Wasps, ants, beetle and many other insects, as well as fruit from wild cherries, poison ivy, blueberries, sumac, elderberries, bayberries, and mulberries, are enjoyed by the Tufted Titmouse. When you put out bird feeders, they seem to prefer large, striped sunflower seeds to smaller ones, and they will readily eat seeds from your hand, or even between your teeth, if you so choose.
To describe the fearlessness of these birds behavior is that they will actually pluck hair from live squirrels, groundhogs, and opossums. They can even try to pull hair from your head, if you are sitting a little to close to their nesting site. The Tufted Titmouse will build their nest out of moss, fibrous bark, leaves, snakeskin, and as we mentioned, hair.
If you like to attract the Juniper Titmouse the Oak Titmouse, (most common in the western U.S), the Tufted Titmouse (most common east of the Great Plains), and the Bridled Titmouse (most common in oak and juniper woods in the South-west mountains), to your lovely bird feeding garden, plant berry bushes, and fill your bird feeders with whole peanuts, sunflower seeds, and suet, also provide bluebird size bird houses. Go to our section on NEST BOXES AND SHELFS, to learn more about the subject.
