Songbird Saturday: the Blue Tit

A feathery fiesta of blue, yellow, green and white, the Blue Tit is one of our most colourful birds here in the UK. It’s also one of the more common, especially in gardens, which provides a wonderful opportunity for most people to hear and learn its song and calls.

The Blue Tit’s delightful, bright, high-pitched trilling has a nimble, playful quality that matches its energetic behaviour. This bird strings together rapid, high‑pitched notes – often a repeated tsee‑tsee‑tsee or a two‑part ti-ti-chee – that carry surprisingly far for such a small bird. 

Males use these calls to defend their territory and to impress prospective mates. Fascinatingly, you can hear them shift between different patterns as they size up rivals or respond to nearby birds. There’s a playful sharpness to the sound, almost like a tiny musical flourish, and once you learn to pick it out, it becomes one of the most cheerful soundtracks of woodlands and gardens in early spring.

The Blue Tit might be part of the same family as the Great Tit and the Coal Tit, which on the surface also sound similar, but once you get your ear in you will start to pick out the differences. The Great Tit’s song is louder, more repetitive with a fuller and more forceful tone, like a small brass instrument to the Blue Tit’s piccolo. The diminutive Coat Tit, meanwhile, has a thinner, sharper sound often described as a rapid, monotone ti-ti-ti-ti or repeated weecho-weecho-weecho – much less varied than its cousins.

Why not go back a week and listen to the Great Tit and the Blue Tit side by side? You’ll find it much easier to pick out the differences, which will help you when you try to identify them out in the field.