I normally find them rootling in the reeds along Carleton Beck, and in this post-Christmas soft spell it makes me want to clench my fist and wave it at the heavens as a salute to their winter survival. For the bearded tits were there all through that grinding deadness of last year's freeze.
Each day I'd see them at the same spot. One bird would suddenly let out a sharp ringing ping sound that always seemed to startle its owner as much as me. Then two birds, it was usually two, would shuffle up the reeds simultaneously, take me in with those fierce and faintly exotic lemon eyes, and carry on feeding. In that world of white they seemed even more beautiful: the soft, dove-like blue-grey of his crown, and the rich warm ginger of their upper parts.
Even when they are buried in cover, one can follow bearded tits by that self-reassuring conversation of sharp notes. Otherwise they signal their whereabouts with mouse-like twitchings of the vegetation. Suddenly, up will pop that amusing male's head with its extravagant black whiskers that look one part pantomime villain, one part Buddhist. The whiskers actually stand proud of the facial plumage like a real moustache, one that is broadest around the eyes and tapers to long, waxed tips either side of the throat.
Bearded tits may carry with them a note of humour but there is nothing comic about their presence at today's sunlit, larksong-filled moment. I recall once watching these birds when, in the adjacent dyke, a swan, 600 times heavier, lumbered through the ice-smeared water, progressing one painful lunge at a time so that the glass-like sheet splintered with each new effort. It was four in the afternoon. There were 16 hours of darkness ahead. It was -10C. Each night I asked the same thing: how on earth did any of them make it?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/24/country-diary-claxton-norfolk-bearded-tits
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