Feeding Birds in Winter (with Tits in Slow Motion)

I have a hedge of thujas growing near where I live. All manner of small songbirds, mostly tits and sparrows, use the hedgerow for nesting purposes and to safely hide from predators.

These beautiful birds are non-migratory and keep me happy with their songs year round. They are perfectly self sufficient most of the year, but in winter, when snow covers the ground, it’s hard for them to find food. So I help them out with seeds.

This year I bought a 2.5kg bag of shelled sunflower seeds, but a few days later I also got an extra kilo of the same but in shells. I have been putting both in a birdhouse I have on a peach tree beside the house in order to feed the birds.

The most frequent users of the birdhouse are tits. There are three types of tits living in my thujas:

Great Tits (Parus Major)
Blue Tits (Cyanistes Caeruleus)
Coal Tits (Periparus Ater)

In this video I show how I refill the birdhouse with sunflower seeds, and then provide footage of tits feeding on the seeds. Some of the footage was recorded by my Canon palm camera, but I also attached a GoPro to a branch and set it up to film at a higher frame rate in order to include a slow motion footage of the tits in the video.

The tits are otherwise very fast birds and because I have a bunch of raptors lurking around, they don’t tend to stick around the same spot for too long, so even at a high frame rate, filming tits is hard. Most of the time they get to the birdhouse, grab a seed and shoot right back off to the hedgerow, in order to stay unprotected as little as possible.

Music for the birds compilation is my own guitar solo. It was improvised and recorded live before a live audience. There is no studio recording of this musical piece.

00:00 Blue tit in slo mo
00:13 Two and a half kilo bag of shelled sunflower seeds
01:19 Refilling the birdhouse
01:36 Compilation of birds feeding on seeds in winter
02:37 Great tit
02;56 Blue tit
03:50 Mean great tit
04:05 Tits on thujas
04:43 Slow motion footage of birds feeding in winter
05:19 Coal tit

Keep rocking :o)

Mark
https://www.nophoneman.com/