Three Familiar Faces at the Feeders

Fill a hanging feeder in an Oxfordshire garden and, sooner or later, three small birds will do most of the work. Great tits, blue tits and coal tits are among our most reliable garden visitors, and for much of the year they travel together in loose mixed flocks, working through hedgerows and along woodland edge in a constant, chattering procession. Because they arrive together, in flat winter light, at speed, and often half-hidden behind a peanut cage, they can be surprisingly easy to muddle. The good news is that each species has a distinct head pattern, a characteristic build and a voice you can learn in a single afternoon.

Work through the three checks below in order: head first, then shape, then sound. You will rarely need to go any further.

Start With the Head Pattern

Ignore the body for a moment and look only at the face. Almost every identification question about these three birds is answered above the shoulders.

• Great tit: a glossy black cap that runs straight down the back of the neck, with large, clean white cheek patches either side. Look also for the black stripe down the centre of the breast — broad and unbroken on males, narrower and often slightly pinched on females.
• Blue tit: a blue cap, white cheeks, and a thin dark line running through the eye. That eye-stripe is the giveaway. The bird looks as though it is wearing a small blue hat pushed back on its head.
• Coal tit: a black cap, white cheeks, and — the clincher — a bright white patch on the nape, at the back of the neck. Unlike the other two, it shows no yellow anywhere. The underparts are soft buff-grey and the back is a muted greyish-green.

If a bird has a white patch on the back of its neck, stop looking. It is a coal tit. Nothing else in a British garden combines that nape patch with a black cap and white cheeks.

Confirm With Size and Attitude

Once you have the head, check the build. Great tits are noticeably the largest of the three, around 14cm, and they behave like it. Chunky, broad-chested and heavy-headed, they dominate a feeding station, shoving blue tits aside and taking the biggest seeds on offer. They often sit still on a branch to hammer a seed open, giving you a long look.

Blue tits sit in the middle at roughly 12cm, neat and compact with a short, square-tailed outline. They are the acrobats of the group, hanging upside down from fat balls and peanut feeders, twisting and shuffling with restless energy.

Coal tits are the smallest, about 11cm, and the slimmest, with a short tail and a disproportionately large head. Their behaviour sets them apart: rather than settling to feed, they dart in, snatch a single seed and retreat to nearby cover to eat it or stash it. If a bird visits for two seconds and vanishes, it is very often a coal tit.

Voices: The Quickest Giveaway

Once you know the calls, you will often identify a bird before you see it — a real advantage in a mixed winter flock.

• Great tit: the famous two-note song, a ringing tea-cher, tea-cher, is one of the first sounds of the year, sometimes starting in January. It is lower and more deliberate than the others, and the great tit is also the most inventive, with a whole repertoire of churrs, squeaks and metallic pings.
• Blue tit: a thin, rapid, high tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee, plus a dry, scolding churrr when it is annoyed by a rival at the feeder.
• Coal tit: the highest and fastest of the three, an almost insect-like see-see-see. Its song is a clear two-note phrase, often written as pitchoo — high then lower — delivered quickly and repeated.

Pitch is the shortcut. The great tit's song sits comfortably in the middle of your hearing; the coal tit is so high and hurried that older ears may struggle to pick it out at all, especially in a breeze. The blue tit's contact call is a constant, needling chatter that runs through a flock like a running stitch.

Where to Watch Them in Oxfordshire

Your own garden is the easiest classroom, and a single sunflower heart feeder will bring all three within a few metres of the window. Beyond the garden, the county is generous. The ancient woods around Wytham and Bagley hold all three in good numbers, and mixed tit flocks there in autumn and winter are worth following patiently — the birds move in a loose wave, calling constantly, so listen for the contact notes and let the flock come to you.

Wet woodland and hedgerow sites such as Otmoor and the wooded slopes of Shotover and the Chilterns edge add coal tits readily, particularly where there is conifer or mature beech nearby. On a cold morning, ten minutes at a quiet woodland edge will usually produce all three.

Getting Your Eye In

Pick one bird at a time rather than trying to sort the whole flock. Watch a single individual from arrival to departure, noting the head pattern first, then size against a familiar object such as the feeder port, then any call. Keep a short note of what you saw and heard; patterns stick far better once written down.

Two final habits are worth forming. First, look at every tit twice — a pale, washed-out great tit in bright sun can briefly confuse, but the black breast stripe settles it. Second, learn the coal tit's see-see-see properly. It is the sound that most often tells you a mixed flock has arrived, and once it is in your ear, you will find coal tits in places you had previously walked straight past.