Tufted Titmouse

Royal Botanical Gardens. Cootes Paradise, Hamilton. ON. January 23 2023.  Cute is an adjective I try to avoid when it comes to birds. But sometimes, as in the case of Snow Buntings, it slips out. I suppose it depends on your idea of cute and it might have a bit to do with your gender. I prefer to see all birds as descendants of dinosaurs: as exploiters, scavengers and predators, usually wrapped in finery.

A good birding friend views the Tufted Titmouse (titmice?) as excruciatingly cute. He’ll go out of his way to catch the sight of one, or better yet photograph it, he’ll zoom and click for an hour or more or until his camera finally declares ‘Battery Exhausted’.

A week or so ago another birding friend posted on FB that she’d seen a Tufted Titmouse at a certain woodland lookout. It’s an uncommon bird for us, we lie right on the northern edge of the titmouse’s range so it’s a noteworthy sighting.  When I saw the FB post I knew it would cause a stir.

Hiking the trails today I learned that the titmouse was still around, still in the same place and that maybe there were two of them. I did want to see it and found it (or maybe them) soon enough. All you had to do was sit quietly and wait. Others birders and photographers had scattered seed around and Black-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, and a couple of Red-bellied Woodpeckers had taken advantage of the mid-winter feast – and of course so too the titmouse/mice.

Of my hundred or so photos, 25 are keepers and I’ve included some of the best.  It’s easy to see why some might describe the Tufted Titmouse as cute, but I prefer to keep my distance. It’s a feathered dinosaur, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pugnacious and bent on two things: survival and reproduction.  Beautiful for being painted in subtle shades of grey, flanked with a rusty-peach wash, and beady black eyes with just a hint of a black eyebrow. Gorgeous and deservedly My Bird of the Day.

Tufted Titmouse is closely related to Bridled, Oak, and Juniper Titmouses of western North America and similarly, but rather less closely, to chickadees and Eurasia’s Great Tits and Blue Tits.

Other noteworthy dinosaur descendants today were a Common Raven who passed low overhead croaking in an appropriately reptilian manner. And this Red-bellied Woodpecker showing clearly for once why it got stuck with red bellied and not, as you might reasonably think, red-headed.