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  Profile

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  In flight

Songbirds

Long-tailed Tit

Aegithalos caudatus

• rare
• 55 km/h
• Least Concern

Half body, half tail. Travels in chattering family flocks that look like flying lollipops.

Population

Very large and stable global population, likely in the tens of millions of mature individuals (order-of-magnitude BirdLife/Partners in Flight estimate); no precise BirdLife DataZone figure could be independently confirmed since that page is JS-rendered and did not expose numeric data through available fetch tools

Habitat

Deciduous and mixed woodland, scrub, hedgerows, heathland edges (favoring thorny bushes under ~3m for nesting), farmland, parks, and gardens; generally scarce in pure conifer forest

Fun fact

A Long-tailed Tit's domed nest is an elastic pouch of moss, lichen, and spider silk lined with over 2,000 downy feathers and built from thousands of pieces of material — it stretches as the growing brood inside gets bigger.

Range

Widespread across the temperate Palearctic, from Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia through continental Europe and the Mediterranean, across Russia and central Asia to China, Korea, and Japan

Diet

Almost entirely insectivorous year-round, gleaning small arthropods (especially moth and butterfly eggs/larvae, aphids, and spiders) from foliage; supplements with seeds in autumn/winter and visits garden feeders (suet/fat)

Size

0.14 m

Wingspan

0.18 m

Lifespan

3 years