Well, the great tit doesn't have the largest
song repertoire in the world, but it's a
very recognisable song, you hear the males making this
(whistles birdsong)
it's just a two note up and down.
The blue tits you'll also hear their calls
around this time of year. That's much
more of a rattling call, which I won't
attempt to imitate, because it's
practically impossible.
We've been studying blue tits and great
tits, particularly great tits, here in
Wytham Woods for more than 60 years now;
the study was started back in 1947.
These birds have very short lives, so
we've actually got more than 40
generations of birds - it's like
studying a human population back more
than 1000 years, pre Norman Conquest
almost, and that really intensive work,
studying individuals and tracking their
lives, where they go to, who their
offspring are and all that, has resulted
in a study that probably means we know
more about this population of birds than
any other population of birds in the world.
When they first started out in Wytham,
they would have been walking around with
binoculars and hiding in bushes and
spending all their time actually
observing the birds. Whereas now we are
using a lot of technology and doing it remotely.
Behind me, you can see that there's one
of our automated feeding stations, which
we collect data on, or where all the
birds are in the woods and who they're
choosing to feed with, which we do
through this PIT tag technology, which
we can just fit into a tiny little ring
on the bird's leg, it's very exciting.
We use a special technique, a thing
called a mist net, which we put up, the
birds can't see that. They fly in, they
very quickly can be extracted out of
there, by trained ornithologists. And
onto those birds, we put two kinds of
mark, we put a metal ring that's got an
individual number, so like a car number
plate almost, and then we put this
little plastic ring that has this
transponder in - and that's the thing that
will be detected, if the birds come and
take food from a feeder.
There's a great tit on the feeder right
at the moment, it's just flown off. So
that bird will have been logged on the
antenna and we'll be able to look up
that individual and know where it was
hatched in the woods, who its parents
were, who its great grandparents were
and what its activity has been over the
winter, in the course of the last years.
We're actually marking and tagging, can
be in a good year, the order of 8000 or
9000 individual birds. And then, of
course, we've got the birds that come in
from outside as well, which could be a
couple of 1000, so we're getting up to
maybe 10,000 birds that we're trying to
track and follow around the woods. Many
of those don't live very long, of
course, most of them, within a few weeks, they
end up in someone's tummy. But
that's natural selection at action.
After I have my breakfast in the
morning, my job is to cut 200 mealworms
in half, which is not the most pleasant
job. One of my main interests is to
study individual differences in
cognitive ability in great tits. So, I
guess, very much like humans, you get
dim individuals and smart ones. But we
don't actually know whether those
differences have consequences for how
well individuals can survive or
reproduce in the wild. So specifically
we're measuring learning speed, and
we're doing this in the wild by putting
out automated boxes, which have coloured
lights on the front, and birds have to
learn to associate one of those colours
with a food reward, essentially. They
basically are like arcade machines.
They've become pretty obsessed with it,
to be honest. When I come to refill it
they're, sort of, shouting at me to give
them some food and let them get back to
their flashing lights. It's generally
assumed that it's good to be clever, but
no one really tests it, and that's
probably because it's quite difficult to
do, you have to actually measure
individual differences in a cognitive
trait, and then follow up those
individuals and see how well they
reproduce and survive in the wild. So
it's quite a hard thing to do, but in
Wytham we're very well placed to do that.
When I was seven years old, I told my
parents I wanted to be an ornothologist.
It's when I first learned what the word
ornithologist meant, and I was always
out in the local swamp with my little
pair of toy binoculars, looking at
birds, and that's never really left me
and I feel very lucky to have been able
to come to Oxford, which is, in many
ways, the home of ornithology to
continue working with amazing wildlife.
A job that gets you outdoors, keeps you
fit and you get to work with animals.
What could be better?