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Blue Tits & Great Tits

Blue Tits & Great Tits

Blue tits and great tits are the birds most gardens get first, and they are the easiest to please: they will take sunflower hearts, peanuts, suet pellets, fat balls and suet blocks, and they are happy to hang upside down from any of them. They are grouped together here because they eat the same things — the difference between them is size and manner, not diet. Great tits are heavier and more direct, and will often clear smaller birds off a feeder; blue tits are the acrobats that keep coming back between raids.

Sunflower hearts are the best all-round choice if you only want one thing in the feeder: no husk, no waste, and high enough in oil to be worth the trip. Peanuts should always go in a proper mesh feeder rather than loose — whole nuts are a choking risk for chicks in spring, and the mesh forces birds to take small pieces. Suet comes into its own from autumn through to early spring.

Both species are hole nesters, which is why a nest box with a small entrance is one of the few things you can put up that genuinely increases the number of birds in your garden rather than just concentrating the ones already passing through.

Related ranges

Much the same food suits woodpeckers and nuthatches. The full ranges are in sunflower hearts, peanuts and suet and fat balls.

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