The brown-headed chickadee, or puffball, is a small, gray, inconspicuous bird. Puffy is named for the manner of strongly fluffing plumage in cold weather. A small gray bird with a fluffy scarf closing on its chest. Her back, shoulders, lower back are gray, her tail is off-white with red feathers, her wings are brown.
The brown-headed tit is widespread in the lowland and mountain forests of the northern hemisphere: in North America, Europe (except for its southern regions), in the northern parts of Asia, in the Caucasus, Sakhalin and the Japanese islands.
Gaitkas are kept in pairs, formed in the fall. These birds nest in coniferous or deciduous forests, and build houses in a special way: unlike other tits, the chickadee hollows out a hollow, and later places a nest inside it. Only in case of failure, they occupy ready-made shelters, most often using the hollows of crested tits, the lesser spotted woodpecker, or their own old hollows. In artificial nesting places, puffs settle extremely rarely. Several nests are known, found in quite unusual places - under the roots of trees, in old nests of thrushes, in a slit-like half-hollow, in the trunk of a spruce at the place of work of the zhelny.
The material for the arrangement are bast fibers, small chips, dry roots, stems, dried moss, animal hair. The construction of the nest is going on very intensively: in an hour there are 12-14 arrivals to the hollow with building material. However, every 1-2 hours, the birds usually stop building for a few hours. In the time free from building a nest and during the laying of eggs by the female, the couple spends most of the time preparing food. On average, it takes about 3 days to build the nest itself.
In such a nest, young chicks will spend their first weeks of life. Both parents feed them alternately.
Until July, young titmouses are tied to the nest, later they will unite in noisy cheerful flocks and make friends with kinglets and other small birds. Until the bitter winter they will roam from place to place. In winter, when there is not enough food for the birds, they can be seen in city parks, gardens, near water bodies. The food of the brown-headed tit is very diverse - these are mainly caterpillars, weevils and spiders.
Like some other types of tits, chickadees store food in summer and early autumn - insects, spiders, etc. The tendency to store food in puffy birds is very pronounced. Throughout the year, they hide part of the food they find. Food storage can be observed even in winter, it would seem, under the most unfavorable feeding conditions. Young plums begin to hide food as early as July.
Powder puffs hide their reserves in a wide variety of places: on coniferous and deciduous trees, less often on bushes, stumps, and even on the ground at the base of the trunks. On coniferous trees, powders have reserves in almost all parts of the tree. Hidden food is sometimes covered with a piece of bark or lichen. In a day, one pichuga can equip and fill up to two thousand of these pantries!
However, the chickadees apparently do not remember the location of the stocks and find the hidden food by chance, along with the first discovered food. The use of reserves sometimes begins almost immediately after they are stockpiled. Part of the stocks found by the birds are eaten, part is hidden again. Due to this constant re-hiding, the food is distributed more or less evenly over the area of the plot. Stocks are used collectively, and not only by chickadees, but also by many species of tits, as well as other wintering birds.
The winter blue flock is a close-knit team, all members of which are well aware of each other's character, which allows them to avoid unnecessary quarrels. The set of laws governing the social life of chickadees is very simple - each bird knows to whom to yield and to whom to show its power.
Gaichki can serve as a model of marital fidelity, which is based on the mutual sympathy of partners and the habit of living in the same territory.
The voice of the brown-headed gait:
Your browser does not support the audio element.Text used:
A. Gorkanova. "Migratory and wintering birds of Russia. Thematic dictionary in pictures"
Artist: Ekaterina Reznichenko
Pairs of these tits show amazing attachment to certain areas of the forest with an area of 10-20 hectares. Their whole life is spent in this limited territory, which they can cross in a matter of minutes. But they perfectly remember every tree here, they know where you can find food, a place to sleep, silt and nests. Every day, flying from tree to tree, they slowly move around their site in search of food, passing a winding path of 3-5 kilometers.
Brown-headed chicks have two songs that are completely different from one another. The so-called whistling song is a series of loud beautiful whistles: "tiu-tiu-tiu-tiu". Each bird uses several of its variants, differing in height and tempo. This song can be heard already in the first sunny days of winter, at the end of December. But most of all it attracts attention in March, when there are still few other singing birds. Together with bullfinches, pikas, kinglets and great tits, powdery birds create the sound background of a forest that has just been awakened in spring.
The second song of the puffy - gurgling - is rather quiet and consists of alternating trills: "si-sisi-sisisi-tur-r-lu-lu-lu ..." Not only plump males sing, but also females. The whistling song is most often used to attract a female and keep partners bonding. Gurgling serves as a sign that the individual has a territory and is going to nest here. A special quiet version of the gurgling song is sung by males when courting females.
When the forest is filled with the sound of spring streams, and yellow coltsfoot flowers bloom on their banks, the puffballs begin to look for a place to nest. Like all tits, they nest in hollows. However, unlike other European tits, puffy tits, as well as crested tits, prefer to gouge a hollow themselves. Live trunks are too strong for their small beaks. Therefore, they choose stumps and dead trees with soft rotten wood for hollows. The male and female take turns flying up to the tree and quickly pinching the rotten wood. Having collected as many pieces as possible in its beak, one bird flies off to the side, and another takes its place without delay. When making a hollow, puffers do not throw chips right under it - after all, those, brightly whitening on the forest floor, can give out the location of the nest. With pieces of wood, they fly away and often not just thrown, but hidden between the needles, behind the lagged bark, into the holes in the place of the fallen knots.
The shape of the finished hollow is variable and depends on the location of soft and hard parts of the wood. And when strong knots make the puffers make a move into the hollow, it is very intricate. Most often, the depth of the hollow is 14-16, and the diameter of the bottom is 7-8 centimeters. The nests of brown-headed chickadees are quite different from the nests of other tits - they do not contain moss. This is a rather careless lining of strips of juniper bast, aspen, hazel, pine bark scales, wool and feathers. Like all tits, the nest is built by one female, and the male accompanies her in flights for building material.
Along with woodpeckers, puffers are suppliers of hollows for others. small birds- hollow-nesting, because every year they make a new hollow. Especially often they are occupied by pied flycatchers. Sometimes they unceremoniously kick out puffs even from new hollows, forcing them to throw eggs or small chicks.
The chickadees begin to lay their eggs later than other tits, in early May. The female spends the night in the nest, where the male accompanies her every evening. In the morning, he again flies up to the hollow and calls his girlfriend with a quiet song. Every morning, before leaving the nest, the female lays one egg, white with brown speckles. The birds spend the whole day together. The female often begs for food from the male, at this moment resembling a fledgling asking for food. And she screams like a chick: "si-ti-zhe." The male from time to time gives her the found food, which is very important for the female during the period of intensive development of her eggs, each of which weighs about 1.2 grams and makes up about a tenth of the body weight adult bird. In the first half of the day, the female returns to the nest several times, bringing bundles of wool, dry blades of grass to cover the unfinished masonry.
The first two days after the appearance of the offspring, the female spends most of the day in the hollow, warming the almost naked, with a rare fluff on the head, shoulders and back, babies. There are usually seven or eight chicks. Forage for the whole family is obtained mainly by the male. Then the female more and more often leaves the nest and participates in feeding the chicks along with the male.
Brown-headed chicks often feed chicks - 300-500 times a day. The food is mainly spiders, caterpillars and sawfly larvae. They bring them eggshell, lumps of earth, shells of terrestrial mollusks. For the entire period of nesting life (about 19 days), about 20-30 thousand (800 grams) of various invertebrates disappear in the yellow mouths of the chicks.
The chicks leave the nest already able to fly well. It usually happens early in the morning. For a long time, the chicks look out through the hole in the notch into a new world for them, until the first one suddenly decides to fly. The rest fly out after him and never return to the nest again. Agitated parents often yell and sing a whistling song. They accompany each chick on its first flight to the place where it sits, and immediately feed it.
Brown-headed chickadee is a bird from the tit family. In Russia, it is also known under the name "puhlyak" because of the manner in which the feathers are strongly fluffed in extremely cold weather. Inhabits coniferous forest zones in Asia and Europe. Unlike other types of tits, it prefers to settle in remote places, but often shows curiosity towards humans.
Brown-headed gaitka: appearance description
The bird has a small dense body, up to 14 cm in length and weighing 9-14 g, a short neck and grayish-brown plumage. The top of a contented large head and the back of the head are matte black. Most of the back, middle and small wings, shoulders, rump and loin are brownish-gray. Cheeks are white-grey. On the sides of the neck there is an ocher hue. On the front of the throat there is a so-called shirt-front - a large black spot. The beak has a dirty white bottom with a slight buffy tint on the sides, legs and paws are dark gray.
The brown-headed tit in the field can easily be confused with the black-headed tit. The difference between them is that the powder coat has a matte, rather than a brilliant black cap and a grayish longitudinal stripe on the secondary flight wings. the brightest hallmark these birds can be called their singing.
habitats
The brown-headed tit is found in the forest zones of Eurasia, starting from the east of Great Britain and the central regions of France, and ending with the coast Pacific Ocean and the Japanese islands. In the north, it lives in areas of woody vegetation, as well as the Scandinavian and Finnish forest-tundra. In the south it is found in the steppes.
The brown-headed titmouse tends to live in flat coniferous, mountainous and mixed forests, in which pine, larch, spruce grow, as well as floodplains and wetlands. In Siberia, it settles in the dark coniferous taiga with willow and alder thickets.
In Europe, it mainly lives among the shrub vegetation of floodplain forests, on the edges and groves. In mountainous areas it is found at an altitude of 2000 m to 2745 m, for example, in the Tien Shan. Outside of the breeding season, the bird tends to rise much higher. For example, in Tibet, powder was seen at an altitude of 3960 m above sea level.
Lifestyle
Birds of this species nest in April and May. They lead mainly in hollows, which are located in stumps and dead trees at a small distance from the ground. The brown-headed chickadee, like woodpeckers, prefers to gouge out its dwelling in rotten old wood. The hollows are about 20 cm deep and 6-8 cm in diameter.
Puffers are engaged in arranging the nest in pairs, which they find for themselves in the fall. Males in the first year of life look for females in the nearest territory (no more than five kilometers). If they fail to do this, they fly away to the far reaches of the forest.
It takes an average of one to two weeks to build a nest in puffballs. For this, birds use branches, tree bark, birch bark, wool and feathers. The nests of puffballs differ from the dwellings of other types of chickadees in that they do not carry moss into their home. Titmouse - brown-headed tit - loves to make hiding places with plant seeds, but most often forgets about the location of the treasure.
Food
Puffballs feed on various small invertebrates and larvae. Thus, chickadees are of great benefit to the forest ecosystem, as they regulate the number of insects. In addition, they feed on the fruits and seeds of plants.
In summer, the diet of an adult tit is divided equally between food of animal and vegetable origin. In winter, they feed mainly on the seeds of juniper, pine and spruce. Chicks are fed with spiders, butterfly caterpillars with the addition of plant foods. Adult puffers eat earthworms, bees, weevils, flies, mosquitoes, ants, ticks, and even snails.
From plant foods, their diet includes cereals such as wheat, corn, oats and barley. Of the berries, gaitka prefer cranberries, mountain ash, lingonberries, blueberries and cotoneaster. bird feeders rarely visits.
reproduction
This season coincides with nesting time. Puffies find a mate in their first year of life and stay together until one of them dies. The life expectancy of brown-headed chickadees is no more than nine years.
Courtship of males is accompanied by songs and shaking of wings. Before mating, they demonstratively bring food to the females. Before the start of laying, the birds resume the arrangement of the nest. Thus, by the beginning of incubation, the chickweed eggs are covered with a layer of litter. The clutch usually consists of 5-9 white eggs with reddish-brown specks. Incubation continues for a half month. At this time, the male obtains food for the mother and guards the nest. Sometimes the female flies out of the dwelling for a short while and feeds on her own.
The chicks hatch asynchronously over two to three days. At first they are covered with sparse brownish-gray fluff, the beak cavity has a brownish-yellow tint. The female and male feed the young together. On average, they bring prey 250-300 times a day. At night and on cool days, the brown-headed tit sits inseparably in a hollow, warming its offspring. The chicks begin to fly a little after 17-20 days after birth, but they still remain dependent on their parents, because they are not able to get food on their own. In mid-July, bird families gather in nomadic flocks, in which, in addition to tits, one can meet pikas, kinglets and nuthatches.
Singing
The vocal repertoire of the brown-headed tit does not have such a variety as, for example, the black-headed one. Two types of song are classified: demonstrative (used to attract a pair) and territorial (marks the nesting site). The first type consists of a series of measured, soft-sounding whistles “tyi…tyi…” or “tii…tii…”. Brown-headed chickadee (see photo below) performs this song at the same height or raises the tone from time to time. Pukhlyaki sing all year round, but most often this happens in spring and in the second half of summer.
The territorial whistle is much quieter compared to the demonstrative whistle and resembles a gurgling trill with an intermittent squeak. It is performed more often by males than females. Also, many ornithologists distinguish a "murmuring" song. A common call includes high-pitched “chi-chi” sounds typical of the tit family, behind which you can almost always hear a rattling and more rude “jee ... jee ...”.
Gaichki can serve as a model of marital fidelity, which is based on the mutual sympathy of partners and the habit of living in the same territory.
One of the most common tits. In terms of total number, it is second only to the great tit (about it next time), and in central Siberia it is sometimes common and more common,
than any other bird from this family
Gaitkas are kept in pairs, formed in the fall. These birds nest in coniferous or deciduous forests, and build houses in a special way: unlike other tits,
the nut hollows out a hollow, and later places a nest inside it.
Like some other types of tits, chickadees store food in summer and early autumn - insects, spiders, etc. The tendency to store food in puffy birds is very pronounced.
Throughout the year, they hide part of the food they find. Food storage can be observed even in winter, it would seem, under the most unfavorable feeding conditions.
Young plums begin to hide food as early as July.
Powder puffs hide their reserves in a wide variety of places: on coniferous and deciduous trees, less often on bushes, stumps, and even on the ground at the base of the trunks.
On coniferous trees, powders have reserves in almost all parts of the tree. Hidden food is sometimes covered with a piece of bark or lichen.
In a day, one pichuga can equip and fill up to two thousand of these pantries!
However, the chickadees apparently do not remember the location of the stocks and find the hidden food by chance, along with the first discovered food.
The use of reserves sometimes begins almost immediately after they are stockpiled. Part of the stocks found by the birds are eaten, part is hidden again.
Due to this constant re-hiding, the food is distributed more or less evenly over the area of the plot.
Stocks are used collectively, and not only by chickadees, but also by many species of tits, as well as other wintering birds.
The winter blue flock is a close-knit team, all members of which are well aware of each other's character, which allows them to avoid unnecessary quarrels.
The set of laws governing the social life of chickadees is very simple - each bird knows to whom to yield and to whom to show its power.
The Russian name "poohlyak" was given for the manner in which the plumage fluffs up strongly in inclement weather. Look how that one on the tree pouted like a powder!
And the gadgets have blue eyes)
It was evening shooting, the Gadgets flew less and less, and then apparently everyone flew away to their nests. Twilight has come.
One of the most common birds from the tit family is the brown-headed tit or puff. The bird got its second name due to the fact that during cold weather it fluffs its feathers very much. In recent years, zoologists have been inclined to believe that birds should be attributed to a separate family - chickadees.
Brown-headed nut on a breast. 
Brown-headed tit on a sunflower. 
Geography of residence
Brown-headed titmouses are inhabitants of Europe and Asia, they are common in the Eurasian forest zone to the Pacific coast and the Japanese islands. In the north, these birds can be found on the Scandinavian Peninsula and Finland in the south on the outskirts of the Alps and the Balkan Mountains, outside the mainland, birds live on the skeletons of Great Britain, Sakhalin, Hokkaido, Honshu.
Pukhlyak leads both a sedentary and a migratory way of life. It is quite difficult to meet these birds near human habitation, usually coniferous and mixed forests of mountains and plains become their habitat, usually these are swampy forest areas, they also live in willow and alder thickets, the main condition is a large number of rotten or dead trees in which to build nests. In the mountains, bored nuts settle at an altitude of up to 3800 meters above sea level.
The black-capped titmouse is a small bird from the tit family that lives in North America. 
Appearance
The photo shows that brown-headed chickadees have a dense physique, they have a large head and a short neck. Their body length does not exceed 14 cm, and their weight is only 8-15 grams. Their plumage is rather inconspicuous - brown-gray. On the crown and on the back of the head, the feathers are matte black, the plumage of most of the back, shoulders and lower back is brownish-gray. On the sides of the neck, the plumage is whitish with an ocher tint. The beak is dark brown, the legs are dark gray. There is no sexual dimorphism.
Nutrition and behavior
However, puffers can eat plant foods, usually these are:
- Tree, cedar and yew seeds,
- wheat,
- hop,
- hemp,
- corn,
- oats,
- barley,
- rowan berries, cranberries, blueberries, etc.
These birds are very suspicious of people, so they do not approach human feeders, even when they are very hungry.
Throughout the year, the titmouse actively makes stocks for the winter, for this it hides its prey in the cracks in the bark of trees, under lichens and mosses, sometimes it hides stocks several times.
Brown-headed tit, in autumn they usually unite with tits, blue tit, Muscovites, in mixed flocks. 
Brown-headed tit or puff fluffed up. 
reproduction
Brown-headed chickadees are monogamous birds, having created a pair, they do not part until the death of one of the partners. The breeding season starts from the end of April, only the female builds the nest, usually it takes her up to three weeks, nests are arranged in rotten tree trunks or dead stumps, up to three meters above the ground, sometimes old woodpecker or protein. Inside the hollow is trimmed with pieces of bark, feathers, birch bark.
The clutch usually contains 5-9 former eggs with brown-red spots. During the incubation of eggs, the male is responsible for feeding the female, after two weeks the chicks are born. If you look at the photo of the chicks, you can see that the first three days after birth they are covered with brownish-gray fluff on the head and back. Both parents are responsible for the nutrition of newborns, flying out for prey up to 300 times a day. After 20 days, the chicks fledge, but for about two weeks their parents will feed them.
The average life expectancy of brown-headed gadgets is two to three years, and the maximum is up to 9 years.
IN winter period there is a strict hierarchy in a flock of birds - females obey males, and young couples are older.
Pukhlyak (brown-headed tit) eats burdock seeds. 
Pukhlyak (brown-headed tit) is swollen. 
Pukhlyak (brown-headed tit) on a branch. 
More types of tits.
