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<\/a>A photo of me and a bushtit banded at Buttertubs Marsh. Photo taken by Paige Monteiro!<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>A close up shot of the banded female bushtit.<\/p><\/div>\n
One of the smallest passerines in North America, are the bushtits (psaltriparus minimus<\/em>). Passerines are any birds that come from the scientific order Passeriformes. These birds are also the only species of its kind to live in Canada and even in British Columbia. They are one of the most social birds that you’ll ever come across and are usually found amongst 10-40 (The Cornell…c2015) other bushtits. But they are so small, only weighing about 4-6g (The Cornell…c2015), that you\u2019ll only notice them when they all start flying out of a tree. Luckily you won\u2019t miss the chance to see these little birds as they often do not migrate and like to stay in the same areas all year round.<\/p>\n These birds have nothing special about their colours but they do come across as cute puff balls! It is hard to differentiate feather colour between male and female bushtits, as they are plain, gray-drab birds with a long tail and a short beak. But an obvious difference between male and female is that males have a dark eye while females have a yellow iris around the pupil. An interesting fact is that bushtits have slightly different colouration depending on the geography. If you see them in the south such as New Mexico, the male bushtits there appear to have black feathers around the ears and eyes (McKnight, 1969).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A male bushtit to the left with a dark eye and a female bushtit to the right with a yellow iris. [link]<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Bushtits have a large breeding distribution range, they are found in the Pacific Coast of British Columbia and the entire Rocky Mountain chain, all the way down to central America along the coastline and the United States interior (Packert et el, 2010). They live in well diverse habitats, from lowlands of wooded or brushy areas such as oak scrubs, mixed woods, and junipers to middle elevations in the mountains of pine-oak woods, oak forest, and well-wooded suburbs (Audubon, 2017). Because of their wide spread distributions, Bushtits are not lacking in numbers and we can safely say that we do not have to worry about their endangerment (Audubon, 2017).<\/p>\n A map of where bushtits are found. From the west coast of British Columbia and the Rockies all the way down to Central America. [link]<\/a> And a dynamic view of the map. [link]<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n But besides trying to find these tiny birds amidst the scrubs and hidden in between leaves, if you listen hard enough you should be able to hear the chatters of a flock communicating to each other. They chip in a faint one-syllabled simple note and are usually in irregular successions (tsit, tsit; tsit; tsit). (Grinnell, 1903) They talk when they are foraging for small insects and spiders. Bushtits will eat any small insects from beetle, caterpillars, and ants to very tiny insects that adhere to leaves and twigs (The Cornell…c2015). There are sometime stragglers that have trouble catching up to the main flock, so they will start chipping to each other as an indication of their whereabouts. \u00a0When predators are near they will all start uttering sharp alarm notes (scre-e-e-e-e-e, etc) (Grinnell, 1903) to warn each other until everyone is in unison. This confuses their predators because the bushtits are scattered in all shrubs and trees so it is hard for the predator to locate a single bird.<\/p>\n\n\t<\/a><\/a>
![[link]<\/a> And a dynamic view of the map.](\"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/guide\/PHOTO\/LARGE\/aab_bush_map_new.jpg\"){kind=link}