Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes March 15 2009

I photographed them through the kitchen window as they dug into a bowl of best wheat, so the pictures are a trifle fuzzy. They are a great tit, coal tit and marsh tit.

These three breed in the same woods throughout Sussex but confuse people because they may all look roughly the same at a distance. They all love coming to bird tables together with the blue tit.

Great tits have a lot of yellow on them and are bigger than the others. Their crowns are very deep royal blue. The other two are black. Great tits have a large white cheek patch, seen easily at a distance.

On my bird table this winter I had eight great tits during the frosty weather but they fought like devils. Well, if you're starving, you would.

Some readers tell me they have had up to 20, where several peanut feeders have been installed with visual barriers between. Mine are open to view.

These are common birds in the nature reserve wood surrounding my home, with about 10 pairs in 40 acres at the very least. The British Trust for Ornithology reckon on about 1.6 million pairs in Britain.

When the male really gets going with its song, it may have as many as 90 different calls. Well what about the other two tits here? Cole tits are easily sorted with that white stripe on the back of the neck. It gives them almost the look of a zebra as they flit restlessly around. Some say they look like Pierrot.

There are only 600,000 pairs of those in Britain, so they aren't so common. Just two pairs in these woods. I hear them squeaking "teacher-teacher-teacher" in a high treble voice from the tops of fir trees.

As for the marsh tit with its black velvet crown. Easy to identify? Yes, unless you have a willow tit look-alike. Those are also quite common in Sussex, but prefer damper woods in the valleys. They are difficult to tell apart till you hear the calls. Marsh tits say: "Pitchou-pitchou." Willow tits say: "Tchay-tchay."

Now is the time of year when they will be saying it throughout the county. But there are only 60,000 pairs of marsh and 25,000 pairs of willow tits in Britain.