Long-tailed Tit

A Long-tailed Tit is easy to recognise: a tiny, round ball of a bird with a stubby black bill and a very long, narrow tail, black with white edges. Its colours are black, white and a soft, dusky pink.¹

British birds have a white crown with a broad black band on each side, running from just in front of the eye back to the nape. The back is black with pinkish shoulders, the underparts are off-white with dull pink flanks, and the closed black wing shows a white panel. Round the dark eye is a ring of bare skin, yellow to red: Birds of the World says yellow is the commonest colour, and that it probably also reflects the bird's mood.²

British and Irish birds belong to their own race, rosaceus, named in 1938 from a specimen from Selborne in Hampshire.³ They are smaller than the white-headed birds of northern Europe and Asia, with a darker pink, and the white crown is flecked with dark brown. In Hokkaido, Japan, the white-headed birds are the famous shima enaga, the "snow fairy".

A Long-tailed Tit is about 14 cm (5.5 in) long, but much of that is tail: across its range the tail alone measures 6 to 10 cm, and the RSPB and BTO both describe it as longer than the body. The wingspan is 16 to 19 cm.^{2, 1}

Adults weighed by BTO ringers average just 7.8 g (about 0.3 oz), and most weigh between 7 and 8.7 g.⁴ That is less than half the weight of a Robin, though a Goldcrest, at about 5.3 g, is lighter still.

Males and females look the same. Young birds just out of the nest look different: their cheeks are dark, so the ring round the eye stands out; only the centre of the crown is whitish; the back is brown, the underparts are dirty white with no pink, and the tail is shorter and browner.

No other British bird has quite the same shape. A Pied Wagtail is also black and white with a long tail, but it is bigger, at 18 cm, has no pink, and walks and runs across lawns and car parks wagging its tail.⁵ A Long-tailed Tit keeps to bushes and trees.

The Long-tailed Tits of northern Europe and Asia, east to Kamchatka and south to Hokkaido in Japan, have an all-white head with no black band. Flocks of these white-headed birds sometimes spread west in large numbers, as when 200 reached the Netherlands in December 1971, but they avoid crossing water, so they very rarely reach Britain.²

Long-tailed Tits are very vocal. One contact call is a high, thin "see-see-see", given especially in flight and by a bird that has lost touch with the flock. There is also a lower, clipped "tup", and a short, rattling trill, "tsirrup", that drops at the end: an alarm or excitement call, often given for no obvious reason. Listen to them, with British recordings drawn as spectrograms, on our Long-tailed Tit call and song page.

They have no territorial song. Both sexes now and then give a quiet twitter of "tup" and "tsirrup" notes, especially in squabbles with other Long-tailed Tits, while building the nest and when feeding young.

Calls also carry family identity. Research at the University of Sheffield showed that Long-tailed Tits tell relatives from other birds by small, individual differences in their contact calls, which they learn from the adults that fed them in the nest;⁶ birds swapped into another nest as chicks later treated foster and true brood-mates alike when deciding whom to help.⁷

Long-tailed Tits live in Britain and Ireland all year. Look in deciduous and mixed woodland with plenty of undergrowth, especially along the edges, and in scrub, heaths with bushes, farmland hedges and well-wooded parks and gardens.

They are found in about four in five of Britain and Ireland's 10-km squares. The gaps are upland moors in mainland Scotland, the Outer Hebrides and Northern Isles, and parts of central and western Ireland, and numbers are highest in wooded lowlands. They are recorded more often outside the breeding season, when their big, noisy, roving flocks are easy to find.⁴

No: British and Irish Long-tailed Tits are resident and stay close to home all year, though a few wander in autumn to islands such as Scilly, the Isle of May, the Outer Hebrides and Orkney. Farther north, in northern Siberia, they are partly migratory, and northern birds sometimes irrupt west and south in large numbers.

Ringing has recorded some longer journeys. The furthest within Britain and Ireland was 521 km, from Hampshire to Northumberland in 2021-22, and three birds ringed together in Belgium on 10 October 2001 were caught together at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex 11 days later.⁸

Mostly insects and other small invertebrates, all year round. Long-tailed Tits pick them delicately off twigs, leaves and buds, mostly in bushes and the tree canopy and only now and then on the ground; the Woodland Trust names caterpillars and the eggs of moths and butterflies as common prey.

In autumn and winter they occasionally take seeds and buds, and they have been recorded drinking sap. They can hover, and sometimes catch insects in flight. When an insect is too big to swallow at once, a Long-tailed Tit may hang from a twig by one foot, hold the prey in the other and peck at it.

The Woodland Trust says Long-tailed Tits will often visit bird feeders, and the BTO says peanut cake, a mix of fats and peanut flour, attracts them.⁹ Offer it, or other fat or suet, in a hanging feeder.

They have become far more common in gardens. The BTO's Garden Bird Feeding Survey found them visiting 3% of its gardens in an average week in the 1970s, and 29% in autumn and winter 2010-11,¹⁰ and they were the tenth most counted bird in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch in 2026.¹¹

Follow the RSPB's current advice: use hanging feeders rather than bird tables or trays, offer only small amounts of suet from 1 May to 31 October, take uneaten suet away after seven days, and clean feeders every week.¹²

The nest is a small wonder: a domed ball of moss and cobweb, covered with thousands of flakes of lichen and lined with feathers, with a small entrance near the top on one side. Birds of the World gives up to about 3,000 lichen flakes and often about 1,500 feathers. Both birds build it, and in a study near Doncaster first nests took 38 days on average.¹³ Most nests are under 3 m up in a thorny bush such as bramble or gorse, but some are 6 to 25 m up in a tree fork or in the twigs of a conifer.

In Britain the first eggs are laid between late March and late April, on average around 8 April. A clutch is usually 6 to 8 tiny white eggs; the female incubates them for 15 to 18 days, and the chicks leave the nest at about 16 days old. Pairs raise one brood a year, and they do not normally use nest boxes. More: Long-tailed Tit nests, eggs and helpers.

An active nest is protected by law: in England and Wales it is an offence to intentionally take, damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while it is in use or being built,¹⁴ in Scotland the law also covers reckless damage and any other interference,¹⁴ and in Northern Ireland reckless damage.¹⁵ Check hedges and scrub before cutting them in spring.

Long-tailed Tits are tame and very sociable. For most of the year they live in family-based flocks of about 3 to 30 birds, built around a breeding pair, their young of the year and any adults that helped raise them. A flock feeds quietly for a while, then moves on noisily, follow-my-leader, to the next spot; to cross open ground the birds bunch together, call, and then cross in single file.

On winter nights a flock roosts in a line along a branch, pressed together, and the birds compete to avoid the two ends. In a study of captive flocks, roosting birds lost about 9% of their weight overnight, and those at the ends lost more.¹⁶

Long-tailed Tits are also cooperative breeders. In the Sheffield study, about half of all broods were fed by one or more helpers as well as the parents.¹⁷ Helpers are birds whose own nest has failed: around a quarter of failed breeders become helpers, most of them males, and they usually help a close relative, most often a brother.¹⁸ Helpers do not raise more chicks in the short term, but chicks from helped nests are more likely to survive and breed.

A Long-tailed Tit that survives to breed typically lives about 2 years, and breeds when a year old. Each year about 44% of adults survive to the next, and about a quarter of young birds survive their first year.

The oldest on the BTO's ringing list was ringed at Burton on the Wirral in December 2011 and caught alive by a ringer 7 km away in September 2021, 9 years 8 months 20 days later.¹⁹ The European longevity list, which gives a minimum age rather than time since ringing, has a Danish bird that a ringer caught alive at a minimum age of 11 years 1 month; the Wirral bird comes next, at 10 years 2 months.²⁰

For so small a bird, weather matters a great deal. Birds of the World says hard winters can cut numbers by up to 80%, and that populations can take several years to recover.² In England, numbers were low after the hard winters of the early 1960s, and again in the cold spell of winters that began in the late 1970s, though the BTO notes that winter deaths may not have been the main cause.⁴ But in the long-running Sheffield study, from 1994 to 2012, warm springs and autumns raised adult survival, wet springs lowered it, and winter weather made little difference, though no winter in that time was exceptionally harsh.²¹

Nests are lost far more often than adults. In the same study 79% of breeding attempts failed, three-quarters of them to predators; most identified predators were Jays, Magpies and Carrion Crows, the rest mammals such as weasels, stoats and squirrels.²² Sparrowhawks take adults.

The Long-tailed Tit is on the UK Green List and is of Least Concern worldwide. The BTO estimated 380,000 territories in the UK in 2016. Numbers swing from year to year with the weather, but the long-term picture is good: the BTO records steady increases from the early 1980s, though it notes that its long-term trend starts at a low point.

The Breeding Bird Survey shows the UK population up 16% between 1995 and 2024, roughly level over the last ten years (up 1%) and up 17% between 2024 and 2025. In Scotland numbers rose 122% between 1995 and 2024.²³