Willow Tit (Poecile montanus) Photo By © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30949154

Dear Readers, a few weeks ago I wrote about the remarkable comeback of the Cirl Bunting, and how the targeted research on this bird and its habits had enabled farmers in the West Country to change some of their farming methods in order to support its recovery. Alas, for the Willow Tit nobody seems to know exactly why it has declined by a shocking 94 percent during the last century, though there are plenty of theories.

This bird is described thus by Laurence Rose in ‘Into The Red‘,

“It’s a bull-necked, plain-clothed, rough-voiced hewer of wood: a no-bullshit plain-speaking rough-diamond worker. Keeps itself to itself. Doesn’t prance about for all to see (unlike some). Gets on with stuff, checking for rot, hacking out test holes, that kind of thing”.

And for sure, this bird hasn’t got the bright colours of the Blue Tit, the in-your-faceness of the Great Tit. It hid in plain sight until 1897, when ornithologists realised that it was a different species from the still-endangered but slightly commoner Marsh Tit. Partly, this was due to where it lives: it seems to have a love for wet woodland, and indeed some of its last strongholds were old colliery spoil slacks and areas of disused, damp, scrubby woodland, full of abandoned cars and fly-tipped dustbin bags. It just goes to show that animals just need the right conditions in order to do well, without any concern for our sense of what a beautiful landscape should look like. In this case, it’s all about damp, rotting wood that provides a nesting hole (which the bird hollows out itself). One theory is that these areas of wet woodland are being drained, or are drying out. Add into this an increase in the number of Blue Tits, who will take over the nest holes given half a chance, and the fact that woodpeckers predate on nestling tits of all species, and you can see how these factors could  contribute to the decline of the species.

However, in my British Birds magazine this month, a study of the complete extinction of Willow Tits in the Dearne Valley in Yorkshire pretty much discounts all these factors as a root cause. The area has not gotten any drier, and there has been no increased in either Blue and Great tit numbers or Great Spotted Woodpecker numbers. Furthermore, a very similar site nearby has at least twenty pairs of Willow Tits. Sometimes it’s a scramble to try to save a species from local extinction, and although a great deal of work has been done on this particular site, the bird seems to have gone from 70 territories in 2015 to none in 2023.

Incidentally, if any of my North American friends think the bird looks rather like a chickadee, that’s because it’s in the same genus, and so very closely related.

Photo By © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31622934

Here’s the song of the Willow Tit, recorded in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland by Dave Pullan. What a sweet, sad sound it is.

And here’s something beautiful. The Back From the Brink project is trying to raise awareness of a number of endangered species through art and poetry. Local artist Linden Katherine MacMahon worked with the Astrea Academy in the Dearne Valley (where the recent study found that the bird had died out) to create a pamphlet of poetry, featuring both the Willow Tit and the Ancient Trees project. You can read what MacMahon has to say about the project here, and can have a look at the poetry here. There are some wonderful pieces of poetry and prose. Such imagination! And that’s  the skill that we’ll need, in the end, if we are to preserve species like this  – to imagine ourselves into the feathered body of a bird and see what straightforward science has missed.

Juvenile Willow Tit (Photo Wald1siedel, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)