A CURIOUS TUFTED TITMOUSE
I guess it's human nature to become more aware of our backyard friends during the winter and certainly during harsh weather. The feeders get filled more often and we watch the suet containers so that they can be refilled.
I also guess that the older we get the more attention we pay and the more enjoyment we derive from our visitors. Some of us even keep logs (or write blogs) about what we see or can draw to our feeders. For instance after living some fifty years in the vicinity of Baltimore Maryland, I saw only one Oriole of the feathered kind. I saw a lot of the baseball kind, but not the natural ones.
Now that I am in South Carolina, there is an oriole visitor to our Camellia bushes every February. It is really astonishing the brilliance of those birds, but go figure.
This little guy is brilliant too, but in a more muted way. The greys, blacks, whites and yellow are organized all in a compact and orderly fashion. Nothing garish, but small, simple, and stately. The bird is friendly but alert at all times.
So how in the world do you acquire a name like "Tufted Titmouse"? A bird in the genus Baeolophus is neither a mouse nor…the other thing. The word titmouse descends from the Old English terms, tit (any small animal or object) and mase (small bird), essentially meaning one small, small bird.
So there you are and you thought it would be something salacious! This fellow is just a bit larger than a Chickadee and hangs out with the little black, white, and grey birds fairly regularly. In fact, they both can be photographed in and on the same branch and feeder. The titmouse range runs from Maine to Texas and as far west as the middle of the country, so they are prevalent and not as hard to see as the Oriole. Thank goodness or I would have pulled the trigger on the camera only a few times in the last fifty years.
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