Animal · Germany, United Kingdom, France
Blue tit
Cyanistes caeruleus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The blue tit is a small woodland bird with a sky-blue cap, white cheeks and a bright yellow front, barely heavier than a pencil. At a garden feeder it is one of the boldest visitors of all.
Picture credit: Martin Kunz (CC BY-SA 4.0) · AK-Bino (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Gllawm (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the blue tit live?
Home: in gardens, parks and oak woods.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 10.5–12 cm. It weighs about 0 011 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A blue tit weighs about eleven grams, roughly as much as two sheets of writing paper and a pencil together. It nests in holes: an old woodpecker hole, a split in a trunk, sometimes a gap in a wall, and very often a nest box. The female may lay seven to thirteen eggs, one of the largest clutches of any European songbird. She times them so that the chicks are hungriest exactly when the oak trees are full of small green caterpillars. The parents then fly back and forth all day long and can bring a thousand caterpillars to the box in a single day. Blue tits hang upside down from thin twigs to reach insects other birds cannot get at, which is why they also cling so easily to a feeder. In gardens, parks and oak woods across Europe they are still very common.
Find it on the globe
Blue tit is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How do you recognise a blue tit?
By the sky-blue cap on its white head, the dark line through the eye and the yellow front. It is smaller than a great tit, whose head is black and white and which has a black stripe down the belly.
Where do blue tits live?
In gardens, parks, hedgerows and above all in oak woods, all across Europe and into western Asia. Most of them stay in the same area the whole year and do not migrate.
Why does a blue tit lay so many eggs?
Because it only gets one really good chance a year. For two or three weeks the oaks are full of caterpillars, and in that short window a pair can raise a big family all at once.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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