Attracting Birds

How to Attract Titmice

Titmice are one of the few feeder birds you can attract in a week rather than a month. They are also the reason your sunflower disappears far faster than the birds appear to be eating it.

If you have mature trees and black oil sunflower seed, you will get titmice. They are among the easiest feeder birds in eastern North America to attract, usually arriving within a week or two of a feeder going up, and they stay year round because they do not migrate.

The tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) is the bird most readers mean: gray above, buff on the flanks, with a pointed crest and a black button eye set in a plain face. It is loud out of proportion to its size, and the ringing "peter peter peter" whistle usually reaches you before the bird does.

What follows is the food and feeder combination that works, the tree cover requirement that decides whether any of it matters, the nest box dimensions, and an explanation of why your seed level drops far faster than the visible bird traffic can account for.

Trees first: the one requirement you cannot fake#

Titmice are woodland birds that have adapted to suburbs, not open-country birds that tolerate trees. They want a canopy: oaks, maples, beeches, hickories, or at minimum a mature wooded edge within a hundred yards or so.

A yard backing onto woods will have titmice almost regardless of what you do. A treeless new development, a prairie property or a high desert lot generally will not, and no feeder changes that. If you are unsure, listen in March and April, when males whistle persistently from high perches and are easy to detect without seeing them.

Where you do have trees, the feeder placement rules are ordinary. Site it about 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.5 m) from a branch or shrub the bird can carry a seed to, following the reasoning in where to hang a bird feeder. Titmice will not linger at the feeder itself, so that nearby perch is doing real work.

Food, ranked by what it actually buys you#

The honest summary is that one bag of black oil sunflower covers titmice completely. Everything else on that list broadens the rest of your feeder roster rather than improving your titmouse odds.

Feeders: they are not picky, but perches help#

Titmice will use a tube feeder, a hopper, an open tray, a suet cage or a mesh peanut tube. They can hang upside down, cling to wire and feed at an awkward angle without complaint, which puts them in the small group of species that a selective feeder almost never excludes.

Two small preferences are worth knowing. They like a perch or port they can grab and leave quickly, because the whole strategy is to grab and leave. And they take to a window-mounted feeder sooner than most species, which makes titmice one of the better birds to aim at if you are feeding from an apartment or have a very small yard.

The caching habit, and why your feeder empties#

A titmouse cannot crack a sunflower seed in its bill. It carries the seed away, pins it under both feet against a branch, and hammers through the shell. Watch closely and you will see the same bird return every 20 to 40 seconds during a busy spell.

Most of those trips do not end in a meal. Titmice are scatter-hoarders: they wedge seeds into bark furrows, under lichen, in siding gaps and in leaf litter, one seed per site, spread across their territory. The pace increases sharply from September onward.

The practical effect is that two or three titmice can move several pounds of sunflower in a fall week without ever looking like a crowd at the feeder. If your seed use jumps in October while the number of birds visible at any moment stays the same, caching is the explanation, not a leak or a night raider. Genuine overnight disappearance has different causes, covered in my feeder empties overnight.

A nest box built to titmouse dimensions#

Titmice nest in natural cavities and old woodpecker holes, and they take nest boxes reliably where cavities are scarce. The specification is close to a bluebird box but with a smaller hole.

Untreated wood, no perch below the hole, drainage holes in the floor, ventilation gaps under the roof, and a side or front panel that opens for cleaning. The general build and siting rules are in nest boxes: sizing and siting. Put boxes up in late winter, well before the March and April prospecting period.

Titmice line the cup with hair, and they are notorious for pulling it directly from live animals, including dogs, deer and occasionally people. If you offer nesting material, follow the safety rules in offering nesting material safely and never put out dryer lint or cut string.

Water, which works faster than another feeder#

A shallow bird bath 2 inches (5 cm) deep or less brings titmice in for drinking and bathing all year, and in dry regions or hard freezes it outperforms any seed change you could make. Set it within the same 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.5 m) of cover you used for the feeder, and scrub it every few days.

Which titmouse you can expect#

The tufted titmouse holds the eastern half of the country, from the Gulf north into New England and southern Ontario, and its range has expanded north over the last several decades.

In central and southern Texas the equivalent bird is the black-crested titmouse (Baeolophus atricristatus), which has a black crest and a pale forehead. In California, oak woodlands hold the plain brown oak titmouse (Baeolophus inornatus), and the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau have the juniper titmouse (Baeolophus ridgwayi). All four respond to sunflower and to boxes of roughly the same dimensions, so nothing on this page changes for readers in Texas, California or the Great Basin.

The flock they bring with them#

Outside the breeding season, titmice travel in loose mixed flocks with chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, kinglets and sometimes brown creepers. The flock moves through a territory on a rough circuit, which is why feeder activity often comes in bursts of ten minutes separated by long quiet gaps.

This is useful. Titmice and chickadees are the scouts that find new feeders, and other species learn feeder locations by watching them. Attracting titmice is, in practice, the cheapest way to speed up everything else you are trying to attract.

What to do this week#

1. Hang one feeder with black oil sunflower, 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.5 m) from a tree or shrub. Any feeder type will do.
2. Scatter a small handful of seed on the feeder lid and the ground beneath it so the setup is visible from above for the first few days.
3. Add a shallow water source at the same distance from cover.
4. Order or build a box with a 1 1/4 inch (32 mm) hole if you want a nesting pair, and get it up before February.
5. Expect them in three to ten days, and if two weeks pass with nothing, work through why are no birds coming to my feeder rather than changing seed again.