The Different The Tit is a rare species in Shanghai – this is the first time I have seen one, although it is quite common in the North of China. Shanghaibirding reported that the species was spotted in Shanghai in 2012, so it’s not the first time but still a rare event for Shanghai birders.
I’m afraid I don’t know why it’s called a variety (also in the scientific species name, different) or why winters aren’t more frequent in Shanghai – surely it’s warmer here than in North Korea?
Just like humans, they are “believed to mate for life” although the truth is a bit more complicated: “a study in China found that 40% of broods contain children resulting from extra-pairs couplings” (HBW).
The female builds the nest and also provides more food for the nestlings – I think the male is usually sitting in a pub, drinking beer, and watching soccer, American football, or whatever sports are popular in places like of North Korea.
According to HBW, the species is one of Japan’s three most popular cagebirds. It’s traditionally used for divination – the bird takes a divination slip from a model Shinto shrine, and your guess is that you’re about to die of an avian-transmitted disease (here in 10,000 Birds, the writers are paid by the number of jokes, not by their quality) … A slightly more detailed description of this tradition can be found here.
The Journal “Archives of Natural History” really laments the decline of this prediction: “Within the culture of bird-keeping in Japan, different tites have a specific image, different from other birds. . They were trained to perform tricks and used in street performances from the Edo Era until the mid-twentieth century when the tradition died out. The decline of bird-keeping culture and the practice of tricks may benefit the conservation of wild birds, but it also marks the loss of an ancient cultural tradition in Japan.” I say: ancient, schmancient – it is better to preserve wild birds than traditional culture.
In one case reported in a scientific paper, a Great Tit chick was fed with 5 Varied Tit chicks by an adult chick pair and got even bigger portions. That’s the kind of altruistic behavior we value at 10,000 Birds. Of course, Donald Trump would have pulled out the Great Tit chick and killed it immediately. Or build a wall around it.
For some reason, male Varied Tits with longer tarsus (which is ornithologist speak for legs, essentially) have a higher proportion of offspring among their chicks ( source ). Now I know that some men consider long legs sexy on women (although that doesn’t include me), but I didn’t know that this preference also applied to women with Varied Tits (which may there is some kind of control mechanism to increase the ratio of offspring if the father is particularly attractive).
“Stating the obvious again” is not only a song by the American band X-tal but could also be a subtitle to a scientific paper on prey size and feeding frequency of Varied Tits. In particular, if the prey becomes smaller, the feeding frequency will increase. It’s surprising.
Various Tits also have the habit of caching food. For example, they sometimes take sunflower seeds from bird feeders in the winter, carry them and store them for later consumption. This has two consequences – one is that the nestlings are able to eat sunflower seeds the following spring. Another is that in the passages where the birds nest, many sunflower seeds appear in the spring, indicating that although the birds have some memory of the stored seeds, they also forget the location of some of them. (source).
