Another side to my Blue Tits: musings and reactions.

A few days ago I reported the strange behaviour among my Blue Tits. And I asked Niall at Birdwatch Ireland for his ideas or if he had ever come across this kind of behaviour.
Although these Bird's behaviour is still pure guesswork on my behalf, and I would not know for sure what had happened on my fence that morning, except what I observe, it is perhaps easiest to try and look into the incident as two different visits? First it is the single Blue Tit which comes to take a look at the stunned bird, and tries to bring it back to life by the tugging on the wings of bird number A. Also it was flying nervously around the little victim. What is, if at all, was the bond between the two?
Perhaps the relation between these two birds can partly be explained by the behaviour I observe on a year round basis.
For a number of years I follow the two birds, always together, roosting in a wall opposite the window of our workroom from where I used to follow them. Every winter they would use it a hide from where they would feed in my garden on a regular basis during the day, but also in the garden at the other side of the wall in the garden of the house which stands in front, but on a lower level than us. This is why we only see the TV aerials on the chimney. The wall, which lines the path leading up to our house, is there to protect anyone from falling down into the garden below.

Their roost is a little narrow gap in the cement in-between two breeze blocks. The opening is only just big enough for the little Tits, with on the other side of the wall another slit high up a “cliff” of limestone, the main ingredient of our hill, rising up out of the garden of my neighbour below. The pair of Blue Tits will always be in and around the wall in front of the trees also rising up from the garden below. Early spring, the two will start with “building a nest” here, but in the end they always abort after awhile, choosing another site for breeding purposes. Most of the time this is in the Conifer trees next to the school and the house below us, just in front of the side of our garden. Here they have to fight for their place though; competition from Coal Tits, and other little ones.
Even so, this year they came to show off their single fledgling this summer.
I have added this, to illustrate the bond between the, what I believe to be, same Blue Tit pair than the ones which were involved in the window-fence incident.

Anyway, this is what Niall's ideas are:

"The Blue Tit behaviour that you noted is indeed very unusual, and I have to say that I have never come across anything like this myself. It is interesting to see such apparent concern for the welfare of this stunned individual from the other Blue Tits, but I suppose we can only speculate as to what the motivation was. We understand very little about the social relationships of even our most common garden birds, though perhaps there was indeed a strong pair-bond present between the stricken bird and its helper and this is what caused it to behave in this manner. The behaviour of the other Blue Tits is a bit harder to try to explain however, as this unfortunate individual would represent competition and it would be in their interest (harsh and unpalatable as this may seem to us) for it to die. Whether they were trying to help or to hinder it is something that we will probably never know, though their behaviour may well have been far from friendly. However, perhaps they were related in some way to the bird and so were keen for “their” genes to survive. It would be fascinating to know for sure."<

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Another reaction comes from Mike, an Irish reader which told us this about Coal Tit behaviour:

".Coal tits act in a similar manner when one of their own or even another species of small bird is in trouble, I had an experience of this a few months back, after a sparrow had snuck into my bedroom through a window and I did not notice it until I heard something fluttering madly near my head at about 5 am.
After about an hour of searching I found a poor little sparrow, who was badly in shock, so I put an empty shoe box near it and it went into it after a while, I then brought it out the back and placed the box in a quiet spot near the bush the sparrows favoured and I sat nearby, to keep an eye on it as it was not well at this point.

As the sparrow lay in the box, a coal tit came down to see what was in the box, and was not put off by me sitting by it, the coal tit flew off and within ten minutes I had coal tit after coal tit arriving to look into the box, and giving their little badger head cheeps as they did.

The little sparrow did not make it in the end and died after about 60 minutes."<

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