Bird Profile

Bushtit

A gray bird the weight of two pennies that travels in constant chattering flocks and builds a woven hanging nest up to a foot long. Suet is the one feeder food that reliably brings it in.

The Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus) is a 3 inch (8 cm) gray songbird weighing about a fifth of an ounce (5 g), which makes it one of the smallest birds in North America outside the hummingbirds. It is plain to the point of being a joke: gray-brown above, paler below, long tail, tiny stubby bill, no wingbars, no eye ring, no stripes, no color.

You will almost never see one alone. Bushtits live in flocks of 10 to 40 birds that move through shrubs and small trees in a continuous stream, twittering the whole time, and a yard goes from empty to full and back to empty in about three minutes.

This profile covers how to identify a bird with no field marks, how the flock actually behaves, the suet setup that gets them to a feeder, and the hanging woven nest that is one of the most remarkable structures built by any North American songbird.

How to identify a Bushtit#

Size and shape do the work. A Bushtit is a small round body with a long, narrow tail that often looks too long for the bird, and a very short conical bill. In silhouette it reads as a gray lollipop working its way along a twig, often upside down.

Plumage is uniform gray-brown to brownish-gray above and dingy pale gray below, with no strong pattern anywhere. Coastal birds tend to have a brown cap with a gray face; interior birds have a gray cap with brown cheeks. Neither difference is worth agonizing over.

Eye color and the black-eared form#

Adult females have pale creamy, yellowish or whitish eyes. Adult males have dark eyes, and so do juveniles of both sexes. It is one of the few small songbirds where you can sex an adult in the field with reasonable confidence at close range, which is worth trying at a suet feeder where birds sit still for a second.

In parts of the interior Southwest, some males show a dark blackish patch through the ear on an otherwise plain head. Birds of this type were once treated as a separate species, the Black-eared Bushtit, and are now considered part of the same variable species.

Confusion species#

How the flock behaves#

The flock is the unit. Outside the nesting season Bushtits move as a group of roughly 10 to 40, occasionally more, working through shrubs, oaks, willows and garden plantings. Birds cross gaps one or two at a time in a straggling line, so the flock arrives and departs as a slow procession rather than all at once.

They keep contact with a constant series of thin, high pit and tsit notes. That sound is usually how you notice them: a faint continuous twittering somewhere in a hedge, then movement everywhere at once.

They also join mixed flocks, particularly in winter, mingling with kinglets, chickadees, warblers and nuthatches. When a hawk appears, the flock gives a shrill, sustained trill in unison and freezes in place, and the sound is oddly hard to locate, which is presumably the point.

Where and when you will see them#

Bushtits are year-round residents from southwest British Columbia south through Washington, Oregon and California, east through the Great Basin, Rockies and Southwest to west Texas, and on into Mexico and Guatemala. They do not migrate, though mountain birds move downslope in winter.

Habitat is scrub, oak woodland, chaparral, pinyon-juniper, riparian thickets and, very willingly, suburbs. Yards with dense shrubs, hedges and small trees suit them; open lawn with a few tall shade trees does not. They are common through California, the lowland Pacific Northwest and much of the Southwest.

Winter is when yards see the biggest flocks. From roughly September through February the birds are grouped, wandering and hungry, which is exactly when a suet feeder is most likely to be found.

What they eat and the feeder setup that works#

Bushtits are insect eaters, and a flock of them is a serious pest control operation. They specialize in the small soft-bodied prey most birds ignore: aphids, scale insects, leafhoppers, psyllids, small caterpillars, beetles and spiders, gleaned from leaves and twigs while hanging in every possible position.

At a feeder there is essentially one food that matters.

Hang the suet feeder where a flock can approach through cover, ideally within a few feet of a hedge or dense shrub. A basic wire cage works, and a DIY suet log with several drilled holes works even better because it spreads the flock out.

The hanging nest#

Bushtits build one of the most elaborate nests in North America: a soft, stretchy, sock-shaped pouch that hangs from a branch, typically 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 cm) long, occasionally longer. The entrance is a small hole near the top, with a passage that runs down the side to a chamber at the bottom.

The material is moss, lichen, leaves, plant down, grass and insect cocoons, all bound together with spider silk. Both members of the pair build, and construction takes a long time, commonly two weeks to more than a month, with the pair adding and repairing throughout. The silk lets the pouch stretch as the young grow.

Nests hang 3 to 25 feet (1 to 8 m) up in a shrub, oak, juniper or ornamental tree, often in plain sight once the leaves drop. Clutches are usually 5 to 7 white eggs, incubation runs about 12 days, and young leave the nest around 18 days after hatching.

Two details make this bird unusual. Extra adults, often males, sometimes help a pair feed nestlings. And the whole family, along with any helpers, roosts inside the nest at night, packed in together.

Voice#

There is no song worth the name. The vocal repertoire is a constant stream of high, thin, slightly buzzy contact notes, often written pit, spit or tsit, given by every bird in the flock more or less continuously.

The exception is the alarm trill given when a raptor passes over: a sustained, shrill, quavering note produced by many birds together, ventriloquial and unnerving. Once you have heard it, look up.

Population and conservation#

Bushtits are common across their range and adapt well to suburban planting, so the overall picture is reasonably healthy, though some regional monitoring suggests local declines. They carry no national conservation designation of concern.

Their vulnerabilities are the ones you would expect for a 5 gram insect eater: pesticide use that removes their prey, loss of the dense shrub layer to hardscaping and lawn, and outdoor cats hunting at hedge height. A yard with structure, laid out along the lines of the bird-friendly yard checklist, is the practical response to all three.

A Bushtit setup that works#

• Two suet feeders, a few feet apart, so a whole flock can feed at once.
• A hedge or dense shrub group within a few feet of the suet, since flocks travel through cover.
• Shallow water with a dripper, which flocks use in a crowd. See drippers, misters and moving water.
• No broad-spectrum insecticide, ever, if you want the birds that eat the insects.
• Native shrubs and small trees, especially oaks and other insect-rich plants, from the list in native plants for birds.