Reasons to Be Cheerful: Long-Tailed Tits

Lord, the changes I have seen... When it comes to the bird life of the London region, the changes over the five decades or so that I've been paying attention really have been dramatic. The most unexpected of the lot were the collared dove - an extremely rare vagrant in my early years - becoming a common garden bird, and the ring-necked parakeet, which really has no business thriving so conspicuously in the wild, passing rapidly from exciting novelty to raucous bullying pest. Most of the birds that have come in from the countryside (thanks to loss of habitat and the 'greening' of London) have been big - heron, kestrel, cormorant, egret - and, in the case of the jays and magpies, loud. However, among the incomers that were once seldom or never seen in town are the beautiful, heart-lifting goldfinches and the tiny long-tailed tits. Yesterday, walking past a Kensington front garden and hearing a faint twittering from within a fragrant Verbena bush, I stopped, and there - close enough to touch, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence - were two long-tailed tits, busily pecking around in the branches. Paradoxically, it's when you see them close up that their tininess becomes most apparent - if it wasn't for their tails, they'd be the smallest British bird, smaller even than the goldcrest. And damn it, they're cute - with their little round bodies and long tails, they have the shape of miniature balls of wool with undersized knitting needles in them, and the roundness makes inconspicuous all the faintly sinister things about birds: the beaks, legs and feet. Their eyes, unlike many birds, have an apparently benign expression, and, like all the smaller tits, the longtails have a cheerful air about them. No doubt the reality of a long-tailed tit's struggle for existence is harsh enough, but to a human they unfailingly bring good cheer - and the closer you see them, the more cheering they are.