It's not everyday you get to hop off the Piccadilly line in central London and be within a minutes walk of witnessing a birding 'first', but that's exactly what I found myself doing today on a very snowy, windy morning in Hyde Park, where central London's first Bearded tits have been spending the past week.
A rather retiring species normally associated with vast expanses of reedbeds along the East coast, Bearded tits are one of the last birds you'd expect to discover in a park in the centre of London, and yet these two remarkable gems seem to be quite at home in a tiny patch of reeds bordering the The Serpentine lake, feeding on seed heads within feet of the path, and providing a great opportunity to get up close to this species in an unusual location...
Both birds display a BTO ring on their legs, so hopes are high that, by piecing together the code on each ring, we can shed a bit of light into the history of this pair.
Even casual passers-by stopped to take a look, once it had been established that they were indeed looking at a bird (who would have thought that the phrase"there's a lovely pair of tits over there" could be taken the wrong way?), and by the end of the afternoon- despite the snow and wind- a steady stream of admirers had gone back home/to work with more than satisfying views of these two little beauties.
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