Now back to a much more fun world – the first image from my weekend trip to Leighton Moss RSPB (as part of the OWPG AGM weekend) – that bearded tit I was on about! No, not some geezer with too much facial hair, but a rare bird that is very hard to see anywhere else.
But at Leighton Moss the bearded tit’s know they’re onto a good thing – they get a ready supply of gravel! Gravel? Well it turns out that they’re really rather lazy critters. When they should have flown several thousand miles to Africa to follow the insect supply, they fail to get off the sofa, and instead have to rely on seeds while overwintering in the UK. And their beaks aren’t really cut out for that – too small and not powerful enough to crunch the husks of many of those seeds. So instead they need to wolf down beakfuls of gravel every day – to help digest those seedhusks and get the valuable nutrition the kernels provide.