Bird Profile

Tufted Titmouse

A gray, crested bird with a black eye and a loud whistled peter-peter-peter, and the bird that bosses every chickadee at your feeder. It takes one seed per trip and hides most of them.

The Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) is a 6.5 inch (16 cm) gray songbird with a pointed crest, a white face dominated by a large black eye, and a rusty-peach wash down the flanks. Over most of the eastern United States it is the only crested gray bird at a feeder, which makes identification a two-second job.

It is also the loudest thing in a quiet winter woodlot. The clear whistled peter-peter-peter carries several hundred feet and starts on mild days in January, well before anything else is singing.

At the feeder the titmouse behaves like a chickadee with more authority: it lands, takes exactly one seed, and leaves. Most of those seeds are not eaten. This profile covers identification and the one confusion species that matters, what titmice eat through the year, the feeder setup they respond to, the caching and hair-pulling habits that generate most of the questions about them, and what a nest box needs to be to interest a pair.

How to identify a Tufted Titmouse#

The silhouette does most of the work. A small, big-headed songbird with a distinct pointed crest, sitting upright, in plain gray.

Details to confirm: soft gray upperparts, clean whitish underparts, a peachy or rust-colored wash along the sides under the wings, a black patch just above the bill on the forehead, and a large dark eye set in a blank pale face that gives the bird a permanently startled expression. Sexes look alike. Juveniles in summer are duller, with a shorter crest and a weaker forehead patch.

The voice is often the giveaway before you see the bird. Besides the whistled song, titmice produce a harsh, nasal scold much like a chickadee's but lower and rougher, and they scold at anything: cats, hawks, screech-owls, you.

Confusion species are few. The northern cardinal is also crested, but even the dull female is warm brown with red in the wings and a heavy orange bill. Cedar Waxwings are crested and sleek but brown and yellow with a black mask. Chickadees share the flock and the feeding style but are smaller, uncrested, and boldly patterned in black and white.

Black-crested Titmouse#

In central and western Texas and into southwestern Oklahoma, the Tufted Titmouse is replaced by the Black-crested Titmouse (Baeolophus atricristatus), which has a black crest and a pale buff forehead. The two were once treated as one species. They hybridize in a narrow band across central Texas, where birds show gray-brown crests of every intermediate shade. Outside that band, the crest color is unambiguous.

Where and when you will see one#

Titmice live in deciduous and mixed woodland, wooded suburbs, orchards and parks, favoring mature trees with plenty of cavities. They do not migrate at all, and a pair generally spends the year within a small territory.

They are more social in winter, when pairs and their young of the year form small groups and join the same mixed flocks as chickadees, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. Unusually among small songbirds, young titmice often stay with their parents through their first winter, and occasionally a yearling stays on to help feed the next year's brood.

Feeder traffic runs year-round. Expect them at first light, throughout the day in cold weather, and less often in June and July when adults are hunting caterpillars for nestlings.

What tufted titmice eat#

Roughly two thirds of the annual diet is animal matter: caterpillars above all, plus beetles, true bugs, wasps, bees, sawfly larvae, scale insects and spiders. The rest is seeds, nuts and fruit, with acorns and beechnuts important in fall and winter. Titmice open acorns the same way they open sunflower seeds, by wedging and hammering.

The feeder setup that works#

A titmouse is heavier than a chickadee and stronger on its feet, so almost any feeder design works. Perch length is irrelevant to them.

A tube feeder of black oil sunflower brings them in. A platform or tray brings them in faster, because they can pick through and select the biggest seed rather than take what the port offers. Titmice do exactly that: watch one long enough and you will see it reject several seeds by weight before flying off with one.

A peanut feeder holding whole shelled kernels is the single best upgrade if titmice are the birds you want. They will work a wire mesh peanut tube all day, and peanuts are dense enough that each trip is worth more to them than a sunflower seed.

Caching: the seeds you never see them eat#

Titmice are scatter-hoarders. A bird takes a seed, shells it on a branch, then wedges the kernel into a bark crevice, under a shingle, in a curl of loose bark or in leaf litter, one item per site. Most caches are placed within about 100 feet (30 m) of the source.

Shelling before caching is the interesting detail: it costs the bird time up front but makes the stored food faster to use later and less obvious to a squirrel. It also means a titmouse working your feeder hard is not necessarily hungry. In fall the caching rate rises sharply, which is why feeders can seem to drain in October with no visible flock.

Why a titmouse pulls hair from a live animal#

Titmice line the nest cup with soft material, and hair is the preferred lining. Rather than gather shed fur, a titmouse will often land on a live animal and yank hair out: dogs, cats, squirrels, woodchucks, livestock and, occasionally, a person sitting still outdoors.

The behavior is well documented and completely harmless, though the animal on the receiving end rarely enjoys it. If you want to redirect it, offer clean natural pet fur or short lengths of animal hair in a mesh bag in early spring. Do not offer dryer lint, long strings or human hair over about 2 inches (5 cm), all of which are hazards; the safe list is in offering nesting material safely.

Nesting#

Tufted Titmice are cavity nesters that cannot excavate their own hole. They depend on natural cavities, old woodpecker holes and nest boxes, which is why mature trees and standing dead wood matter so much to local numbers.

The nest is a cup of moss, damp leaves, grass and bark strips, lined with hair. Clutches are usually 5 or 6 eggs, incubation runs about 12 to 14 days, and the young fledge roughly 15 to 16 days after hatching. Most pairs raise one brood a year.

For a box, use a 1 1/4 inch (3.2 cm) entrance hole, a floor about 4 by 4 inches (10 by 10 cm), and mount it 5 to 15 feet (1.5 to 4.5 m) up at a wooded edge. Sizing details for every species are in nest boxes: sizing and siting. Keeping feeders stocked through the nesting weeks does no harm to nestlings, since adults feed the young insects regardless, a point covered in feeding during nesting season.

Population and range expansion#

The Tufted Titmouse is common and its numbers have increased over the past century. The range has pushed steadily north and northeast into New England, southern Ontario and the upper Midwest, into country where the species was rare or absent a hundred years ago.

The usual explanations are maturing second-growth forest and the spread of winter bird feeding, with milder winters likely contributing. Both are plausible and neither is proven on its own. Whatever the cause, the expansion is one of the clearest range shifts in eastern backyard birds, and it is still going on.

A setup that holds a pair of titmice#

• Black oil sunflower or hearts in any feeder, kept fresh.
• A peanut feeder with whole shelled kernels, which they will prefer to almost anything else.
• A suet cage from October through March, sited on a trunk or pole.
• A perch tree within 12 feet (3.5 m) so they have somewhere to open the seed.
• A 1 1/4 inch (3.2 cm) nest box up by late February, at a wooded edge.
• Mature trees and any safe dead limb left standing, which supply both cavities and caterpillars.

Titmice are among the easiest feeder birds to keep once the food is right, and the rest of the winter flock follows them. More detail in how to attract titmice and winter bird feeding.