Jezebel and the Tits

There are these little birds over here called tits. They’re a lot like the chickadees that we have back home. Small, flitty, chirpy...you often look up and see them clinging to a small branch, picking at bugs or somesuch. Cute as the dickens. They have names like coal tit, blue tit, marsh tit, and the all-time sniggler, great tit. Even birders (or “twitchers” as we’re called over here) can’t help but peel off a few tired lines every-now-and-then, e.g. “Why that’s a lovely pair of tits up there...” Actually, if I were to say something like that with a group of European birders, and follow with the snort, guffaw, knee-slap combo, they’d probably ban me from their birding group. So maybe it’s just me.

Regardless, I love the tits. I love them for their own sake but I also love them because they spend quite a bit of time flitting about in the big, scraggly crabapple tree in our yard. We have this great window in our upstairs bathroom that takes up essentially the whole wall and you can stand in the shower and watch the tits (and all the other birds for that matter) do their flitting thing. It’s my kinda bathroom. (It’s important to note here that the window looks out on the crabapple tree, our small side garden, and the great stone wall of the old stables. And that’s it. See the Ballyknockmilliedoon post if you want a better idea of where we live. I’ve only had one occasion of showering and needing to drop out of view from unexpected eyes, so the shade is never drawn.)

OK, back to the tits. The first thing I did when we moved in last year, around this time of year, was to go out and buy a couple of feeders. After a bit of research, I bought a sunflower seed feeder and a peanut feeder, occasionally putting up a suet feeder as well. And that seemed to suit these birds just fine. Before too long we had loads of birds using the feeders. The tits were, by far, the most abundant, but we also had chaffinch and greenfinch. The magpies and jackdaws would catch wind of it when things were really hopping, and they’d come ‘round to cause trouble. There were other birds, like the robins (my sweet sweet robins), the dunnock, or the thrushes that never went to the feeders, but they would watch from the tree and, oftentimes, drop to the ground below the feeders and eat the scattered bits.

And this is where my cat, Jezebel, enters the picture.

Despite being raised on the streets of North Portland (pre-gentrification), Jezebel was never a scrapper. She was vaguely interested in the comings and goings of birds and mice, but it always seemed to be more from a natural history, taking notes, kind of a perspective...like me. She would just sit and watch. Even when the baby mouse was scurrying back-and-forth in front of her, she just sat...and watched. Despite her propensity for casual observation, we bought her a bell for her collar...just in case. We wanted the birds to have advanced warning of any potential disruption to their flitting, but, because she never felt the need to disrupt their flitting, the bell’s use became primarily a cat-finding device.

So, imagine my surprise, when I walked out to the base of the crabapple tree one day a few months ago and found Jezebel with two little bird legs sticking out of her mouth. Because of my astute skills as a biologist I surmised that she was in the process of eating the bird. Like the whole thing. She looked up at me and continued her bone-crunching chewing and I, in shock, could do nothing but stand there and watch the little black claws disappear into her mouth. Sadly, I couldn’t tell which species she had devoured, but I’m sure it was either a robin (my sweet sweet robin) or a tit because these were the birds that spent the most time on the ground below the feeders. So sad. Needless to say, they wouldn’t have been hanging out on the ground if it hadn’t have been for those feeders. I guess all this fresh air and farm living has inspired the vicious carnivore in our little girl. And I guess the bell doesn’t work for shit.

So, life’s been different since that day. I no longer fill the feeders. In fact, they got blown down in a wind storm and I don’t think I’ll put them back up. Now that the air has a chill and the leaves are turning, the tits are flocking and spending more time in the crabapple tree. Sometimes Jezebel hops up on the window ledge while I’m taking a shower and we watch them together.