Tits, chickadees and titmice | Paridae

Mezen | Páridos

The feet are short but strong enough to let the bird hang upside down from a twig tip while searching among needles or leaves for insects and seeds. In autumn these birds cache thousands of seeds and insects scattered over a wide area, and a markedly enlarged hippocampus lets them relocate those hiding spots weeks later. The family nests in cavities, usually an abandoned woodpecker hole or a soft, rotten stump excavated into a nest hole by the birds themselves, lined with moss and hair. The familiar, partly innate alarm call encodes in its number of repeated notes how dangerous an approaching predator is judged to be, and outside the breeding season chickadees and titmice often join mixed flocks with other small woodland birds.