Country and Coast: The feather dusters who make a meal out of spring-cleaning

I chanced to mention this to a friend who was learned in the way of wild birds. He said, “Leave it. They’ll do it and make a far better job than you. Watch them if you can.”

We were fortunate to notice them beginning their task and so we watched from a discreet distance, fortified by binoculars and coffee. Only one turned up for that spring-cleaning session but I have no idea whether it was the male or female. They are so alike and both gather nesting material, so I guess both would do the spring-cleaning.

They started with predictable activities such as gathering the old materials and thrusting them out of the box via the entrance hole. This is exactly what I would have done except that I would have removed the back of the box to extricate all the old stuff.

It is fair to say that the blue tit worked like a slave until he was satisfied there were no grassy strands, hairs, bits of moss or dirt left. I felt like congratulating him on a job well done.

But he hadn’t finished. What followed sounded like a tiny machine-gun peppering the walls of the nest box and I was to learn this was the blue tit rapidly hammering the woodwork with his beak. This set up a series of vibrations that caused all the tiny bugs to jump out of their hiding places for fear of their lives. Of course, they jumped into the path of the blue tit who disposed of them – and how he did that, I am not sure. I suspect some were devoured and others thrown out.

The result was a nest box in pristine condition and so the pair began to construct their own dream home. It was later when the chicks were born that we saw further examples of just how clean blue tits really are.

Each time they flew into the nest box with a caterpillar or grub to feed the chicks, they emerged with a tiny white sac of poo, which they carried away for disposal.

Few of us realised this happened until the advent of miniature cameras that were secreted in such nests. Quite suddenly, the private lives of many birds were revealed and, in the case of the blue tit, we saw a parent feed a chick at one end of its body, whereupon the chick immediately bent low with its bum in the air to exude the sac from the other end – for the parent to remove. All very sanitary.

The chicks left the nest by popping out like ping-pong balls expelled from an airgun. They couldn’t fly properly, they had no sense of direction, they landed all over the place including my daughter’s head – but, my goodness, they were clean.