The First Ladybird Book of British Birds – #4 The Blue Tit
Leafing through this 1950s Ladybird book is fascinating. Today I’ve come to the Blue Tit:
Here’s my childhood sketch of Blue Tits. I was twelve:
They are fabulously entertaining birds.
And here’s one of my favourite recent digital photographs of a Blue Tit, forty years later:
Here’s my drawing of a Blue Tit from when I first got a set of Rotring pens for Christmas when I was 13 years old:
And here’s my first ever photograph of a Blue Tit after I’d treated myself to a telephoto lens a year ago:
This lovely little bird is very common in gardens and towns and will eat almost anything.
That still seems to be true over sixty years later.
Forty years ago I drew a diagram of a Blue Tit and noted when I’d seen one in my nature notebooks:
Here’s the full story:
In my local country park they have routered portraits of birds and I love this one of the Blue Tit:
Unfortunately I then noticed a small detail on the portrait of a Sparrowhawk:
In closeup their beaks look as metallic as their leg rings:
I love the period detail in the Ladybird book added by:
They are also very fond of pecking off the caps of milk-bottles when left on the doorstep in the morning.
How many people under the age of thirty even know what that sentence means?
