This is my contribution to the Tuesday Photo Challenge – Twist prompt.
I had a few ideas for the prompt and even edited photos of two species of snakes before heading off in a different direction.
An adult Eurasian Blue Tit twists to feed the young while the young twist to try to get the food. The young are almost fully grown at this stage meaning that the adults often cling to the entrance hole to feed them.
My Saturday Bird this week is a young Eurasian Blue Tit.
The photo raises a couple of interesting points. The yellow plumage shows it is a young bird hatched from an egg in the spring. It has only been out of the nest for a couple of months. The bird has a ring on its leg which means that it was probably ringed while in the nest.
I did some research and the closest location I could find for the bird to be ringed was three miles away in a straight line. That means that this bird has already travelled a considerable distance in the short time since it left the nest.
The other interesting point is the birds activity. It’s pecking open an Oriental Poppy seed pod to get at the seeds inside. I had seen and photographed adult birds doing this previously but not young birds. So did this bird learn how to do this by watching an adult or is it instinctive behaviour?
This week Throwback Thursday is traveling back 13 years to August 2007.
This is a female Common Merganser with young on Lake Huron near the Long Dock in Southampton, Ontario, Canada. This was a very late brood, the young wouldn’t have long to grow and prepare to head south for the winter.