Dear Readers, I was sitting in the garden yesterday, watching my husband getting the duckweed out of the pond (a thankless task for sure) when he stopped, cocked his head, and announced that he could hear a baby bird. Well, Readers, my work here is done if my husband can recognise such a thing, but it seemed a bit suspicious – after all, it’s only just April. And then, as I watched, I realised that it was a pair of blue tits, and the male was popping down to collect a sunflower seed and then popping back to feed the female, who was fluttering and making sounds like a baby bird.

Now, I always thought that this was part of courtship (and indeed it’s known as ‘courtship feeding’) but I couldn’t be more wrong. According the British Trust for Ornithology, male birds feed female birds after they’ve paired up, but when they’re already forming or incubating eggs – in blue tits, the male can provide up to 40% of the female’s food during the period before egg laying starts. It’s been suggested that if the male helps to feed the female she can spend more time incubating her eggs (and later protecting the hatchlings) – eggs and nestlings are extremely vulnerable to predators, especially if unattended. I’m sure it also helps with pair-bonding (I’m always delighted when my husband comes home with ice cream from the corner shop so the hen blue tit is not alone).

Earlier incubation may also mean earlier hatching and earlier incubation, giving the birds a chance to breed more than once in the season – blue tits can produce a dozen eggs at a time (though not all of these will survive), so a second brood really increases the chances of at least some of the young surviving. I do wonder about this year – it feels as if, in East Finchley at least, it’s been a month since any rain, just at the time when plants and insects need a bit of moisture to grow. No rain, no juicy leaves, no caterpillars, nothing for the blue tits. Fingers crossed that I’m wrong.

And just to cheer us all up, here’s the male blue tit from last year, complaining about a very obvious cat. What feisty little devils they are!