Bushtit

About the Bushtit

The Bushtit is a scrap of a bird - one of the smallest songbirds in North America, a plain gray-brown puffball with a long tail, tiny bill, and (in Texas) a distinctive dark ear patch that marks the interior "Black-eared" form. Females have pale eyes, males dark, and there is little else to see - the appeal is entirely in the behavior.

Bushtits are never alone. They travel in restless flocks of a dozen to forty, streaming from bush to bush in a thin trickle of soft, lisping contact calls, hanging upside down to glean insects from twig tips. The nest is one of the wonders of the bird world: a hanging sock of spider silk, moss, and lichen up to a foot long, woven by both parents and often attended by extra helpers.

In Texas the Bushtit is a year-round resident of the oak-juniper hills from the western Edwards Plateau through the Trans-Pecos mountains, and a flock swirling through the oaks of the Davis Mountains is a classic sound of the West Texas high country.