Tag: Great Tit

Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Bathrooms/Outhouses.

David M2 Comments

This is my contribution to Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Bathrooms/Outhouses.

As is sometimes the case, I took a sideways look at the challenge and thought about bathrooms and outhouses in the natural world.

To a bird, any water is a bathroom, here a male House Sparrow is bathing in a garden pond in Nantwich, Cheshire, England. Bathing is an important part of feather maintenance.

Monochrome House Sparrow bathing.

An adult Great Tit removing a fecal sac from a youngster in Hatherton, Cheshire, England. The young produce fecal sacs to allow the adults to remove the droppings and keep the nest clean.

Great Tit removing fecal sac.

Feeding Recently Hatched Young.

David M7 Comments

One from the archives taken in Cheshire in the late 1980s.

Having documented the complete nesting cycle of a pair of Eurasian Blue Tits in 1987 I went on to photograph other species in different nestboxes over the next couple of years.

Here an adult Great Tit (Parus major) is about to feed some recently hatched young with a small yellow green caterpillar. While it looks as if the bird is looking at the camera it was just the timing of the shot. It was dark inside the nestbox, I was releasing the shutter a second or two after hearing an adult land at the entrance hole.

Feeding Recently Hatched Young.