Recognition: Titmice are small birds, one size below sparrows. And they are very gray birds, a little lighter below than above, but otherwise quite uniform in color. Their one distinctive feature is a crest, which can be raised or lowered: agitated or alert birds will typically show a more prominent crest, while at other times it can relax to near invisibility. Titmice are common birds at seed, suet, or nut feeders, as well as our most common occupant of backyard bird houses.
The one other small gray bird we have around here is the bushtit, which never shows any crest, is even smaller and rounder (their body is very reminiscent of a ping pong ball), has high-pitched but rather generic chip notes for a voice rather than the distinctive raspiness of titmice, and for nine months of the year is found almost exclusively in hyperactive flocks rather than titmice-style pairs.
Name: Our local species is the oak titmouse, Baeolophus inornatus. It’s our only local member of the tribe, so the unadorned mononomial of “titmouse” is a perfectly adequate everyday appellation.
Where and When: As their name suggests, oak titmice usually associate with oaks. This is a fairly comprehensive overlap, with most of the diversity of oak habitats home to titmice. They are fairly adaptable in their food requirements, however, eating a variety of insect and plant foods in addition to acorns, so even a human-planted community with a diversity of trees is often adequate: out of the native oak woodland birds, titmice and jays have adapted best to residential neighborhoods and parks. Titmice do not migrate and are found here all year-round.
Voice: The basic titmouse voice is scratchy, raspy, and frequently heard, taking the form of various rather belligerent patterns, such as ssic-rap sssicrap (W.L. Dawson’s tighter rendition of a chick-a-dee pattern), tsay tsay tsay, and see-jert-jert. Here’s a common, basic sssicrap:
Their song is quite different in tone quality, often surprising those who thought they knew what the titmouse voice sounded like. Their main, most commonly heard song involves a series of two-syllable pairs, loud and ringing: teewee, teewee, teewee, teewee. The number of teewees may vary, but listen for these pairs of higher and lower syllables. Although unraspy, it is still a richer sound and more moderately pitched than many of the thin high whistles heard in sparrow and goldfinch songs. They do sometimes sing a song of single syllables, a kind of trill of wee-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee only. Note that it still possesses that middle-toned, slower and rolling, rich quality, distinguishing it from the trills of juncos and towhees. Titmice are early singers, usually starting in December and becoming regular in January, then gradually fading out around April.
The Titmouse Dimension
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.
– Emerson, “The Titmouse”
Though drab in color, this crested parid is the voice and soul of the oaks.
– Dave Shuford, The Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas
The Voice and Soul of the Oaks
I’ll spend the bulk of my time today unpacking Emerson’s “titmouse dimension” and considering how we too can rise above cowardice to achieve greater valor and amplification of all sorts of other admirable qualities by consorting with titmice. But first we’ll set the scene with a quick dose of background biology via the second quote: you don’t need a PhD in ecology to appreciate titmice, but understanding a few basic facts about the “crested parid” will I think be helpful.
What is a parid?
A parid is a bird belonging to the Paridae family, which is to say titmice and chickadees. Here in Marin, we have one of each: the oak titmouse and the chestnut-backed chickadee. Speaking broadly of American birdlife, titmice are the ones with crests and chickadees are the ones with black-and-white faces. Other than that, the two branches of the family share a lot of traits: both nest in tree cavities, both are omnivores, both have some similar vocalizations, and both have developed the unique skill of holding hard food items between their feet and smacking them with their beaks to break them apart.
What is the biological significance of being a drab and crested parid?
Being drab and crested, as noted above, is what distinguishes titmice from chickadees, particularly in the case of our particularly drab local species. I’ll discuss the crest more below for both its functional expressive quality and for the general jaunty and irreverent impression it tends to make on people.
Being drab is also biologically significant, for reasons I expounded at length in my essay on the brown-bird, the California towhee. As with that species, our titmouse lives in a year-round, territorial pairing, unlike the chickadee, which pairs up for the nesting season, but spends the winter foraging widely in a larger flock. The more high-contrast plumage of chickadees is thought to function evolutionarily as a form of badging: similarly to how fancy plumage can show health and fitness for the mating season, it can also help demonstrate health in a way that is relevant for determining social standing in a flock. Imperfect plumage changes how the flock members treat you.
Titmice aren’t like that, since they live in a permanent Nation of Two. They’re settled-down homebodies. They don’t need a power suit to impress their coworkers – they don’t have any. They don’t need to look good for their spouse – she’s not going anywhere. I think that’s essentially the typical evolutionary explanation: they’re gray because they have no friends and they don’t do that yearly dating thing like the gaudy finches. Same thing but different: they’re gray because they are both self-reliant individualists and extremely insular, very committed romantics.
Is “voice and soul of the oaks” a technical designation?
Yes.
But wait, what about the–
No, no other bird can claim that title. Now you know what a titmouse is! On to the important part: why you want to know about titmice.
The Titmouse Dimension
I talk to everyday normal people just getting into birds several days a week. I have consistently found that titmice are among the best-loved, most-admired, and first-recognized birds. They immediately jump ahead of the more numerous and colorful finches in the popular impression of spunk, character, and individuality. What is spunkiness? It’s a word we seem to apply when we want to praise spirit, pluck, assertiveness – especially when those qualities are not reinforced by the size or strength that makes such belligerence easy. People don’t like bullies; they like tireless underdogs. This basic combination of irrepressible assertiveness with small stature is what Emerson was praising in the “titmouse dimension.” When the Sage of Concord, the Prophet of Self-Reliance, and the Declarer of American Intellectual Independence looks for indomitability, he doesn’t turn to bald eagles or bears or mountain lions: he looks to titmice.
(Nomenclatural Aside: Careful readers of the full poem will note that Emerson is describing a winter bird of Massachussets with plumage of black and gray, with a winter call of chick-a-dee-dee and a spring song of phe-bee. It’s not the oak titmouse of California. Instead, it seems to be the black-capped chickadee. As noted above, chickadees and titmice are in the same family: the “titmouse” label has historically been applied to both branches. Our chestnut-backed chickadee might therefore seem the closer relative to Emerson’s subject, and it is, biologically speaking. But in terms of character as described in the poem, I think our titmouse is an equally valid inheritor of his praise. Which is linguistically fortunate for us, since he calls the poem “The Titmouse” and I would really be inconvenienced if he called it “The Chickadee.”)
Visible Pluckiness and Physical Smallness
When someone makes their first encounter with the titmouse, what do they notice? Not color – these birds are about as plain as conceivable. No, the first visual trait to attract attention is their crest, or, as birding neophytes not inaccurately refer to it, their mohawk. As with humans, a pointy vertical extension rising from the head seems to immediately give a sense of verve and daring, scorn for convention, self-confidence and irrepressibility. This first impression tends to stick in the case of the titmouse, for the simple reason that it is accurate.
After all, what is a crest? It is an expressive tuft of feathers, providing a clue to emotional state which is imprecise to our clumsy human interpretation, but still more valuable than the relatively blank slate that is a house finch or even chickadee. When agitated or belligerent, they clearly raise the crest. Mid-level agitation is known as alertness and a sustainable, baseline belligerence is known as song: both of these merit perky though not maximized crest elevation. Calm feeding, on the other hand, can lead to a relaxed, almost flattened crest. The thing is, more often than not, titmice do seem to be agitated, belligerent, or alert – our sense of a bird that is actively alive and assertive stems from the sight of the crest in large part because that is what the crest is expressing. People often misinterpret birds, but here our first impressions are relatively accurate.
Of course, our impression of alert belligerence does not stem from observation of the crest in isolation. The crest activity is always joined to the overall activity of the bird, and the overall activity of the bird is what you would imagine. He walks the walk. My old friend Dawson put it this way back in the 20s:
Wherever found, a crested Titmouse is lively and officious, a sort of major domo of the woods, before whom every invader must give account.
– William Leon Dawson, The Birds of California
That invader might be you. It might be another intruding titmouse from across his vigilantly defended border (remember that titmice, like towhees, maintain a year-round Nation of Two). It might be the local scrub-jay – potentially dangerous, but a ubiquitous cohabitant of the woods, one to keep an eye on. Think of how people must have formerly lived with grizzly bears here in the Bay Area. They are undeniably dangerous creatures, bigger and stronger than us, and potentially interested in eating us should the opportunity present itself. You would always be aware of them, would always have to stay somewhat on your guard when in their territory, but you wouldn’t let them drive into you sleepless hysteria. You would have to attain a sustainable compromise between alertness and going about the rest of your business.
That’s the attitude of titmice in a world of jays and crows and sharp-shinned hawks. Because when you lack the distributed awareness of a larger flock, it means that each of the two members of this little tribe need to be especially alert.
Alert, officious, often belligerent: this spunkiness and attitude makes titmice stand out and grab our generally imperceptive attention. We especially like it in combination with their small size. In part, you might think it condescension for us to say, “Oh, look at the cute little bird, it’s so plucky, but so small and powerless compared to me.” If hummingbirds were the size of Dobermans, we wouldn’t be so amused at their boldness. Psychologically, this is simply the reality of how we react to birds and animals and babies: the smaller they are, the more ready we are to treat them as cute. Which means that small creatures present an opportunity and invitation for closer acquaintance. And the case of the long-established human affection for titmice is rooted with particular firmness in this basic fact of diminutive proportion.
Etymological Aside: The Centrality of Smallness
“Titmouse” can strike newcomers to bird etymology as rather an odd word. It’s a traditional name, with some 500 years of use in England to refer to other members of the same general family. The misleading confusion stems from the way the two components of this name have converged with two mostly unrelated words: “tit” was simply an old word for small things, while “māse” was the Old English name for this bird, only coincidentally similar to the rodent “mus.” Modern spelling conflated the bird name into “mouse” and generally applies the rodent plural of “mice” to the bird. (Though a few pedantic holdouts still insist on “titmouses.”)
Just imagine you’re in England enjoying the flitting blue tits in the hedge until “tit” reestablishes itself in your mind as the affectionate diminutive it originated as. Envision that historic day circa 1500: Chaucer’s grand-niece was out working in the garden and starting chatting in a friendly manner with the “tit-māse” (the little māse) that was squeaking away in the shrubbery and soon everyone was saying “you’re right, that is a cute little māse, I’m going to starting calling it a tit-māse too,” and before you know it the Pilgrims were making friends with little American tit-māses and us belated Californians were likewise discovering the pleasures of embedding our affectionate diminutives into the very names of our backyard birds.
(My mother used to insist to me that xiao gou (“little dog”) was an affectionate way to address one’s child in Chinese. She wouldn’t lie to me, right? Diminutives = affection. That’s what I keep telling myself to explain those “little dog” epithets that seemed to periodically come out when a board game wasn’t going her way.)
So there you have the first and most central conjunction of qualities that make the titmouse special: when you “come down to the titmouse dimension,” you are obviously and most literally diminishing in size, but Emerson’s crucial contention is that titmouse smallness also contains valor and boldness often lacking in bigger creatures. When you combine assertiveness in a tiny body, humans find this cute and attractive. This isn’t just condescension; it’s reality. When big animals are assertive, we are afraid of them, due to sensibly evolved instincts. The smallness of the titmouse enables us to look at them with admiration for their boldness, freed from the suppressing force of fear, which often limits our admiration of, say, tigers, to unnatural confinement and documentary films. Smallness enables closeness and intimacy.
Audible Assertiveness Made Sympathetic by Raspy Squeakiness
There is a second titmouse trait that follows a similar pattern: their delightfully raspy voice is constantly expressive of belligerence or at least alertness, but any threatening quality is negligible to us giants, especially given that voice’s inherent counterbalancing trait of squeakiness. Squeakiness is practically synonymous with cuteness when it comes to sounds, but I will again underline the fact that “cute” is not merely a convenient and condescending label for modern humans to apply to animals that sound like our stuffed animals and cartoon characters. The bird sounds came first: examples of squeaky sounds in our created culture are ultimately imitations of the birds. If smallness is one piece of good visual evidence for harmlessness, a titmouse’s raspy squeakiness is an equally compelling piece of auditory evidence. Some small things are still dangerous and we evolved an instinctive fear of them, but poisonous snakes and spiders do not speak like this. We evolved to not fear squeaky birds.
Enough weighted evolutionary speculation. Let’s come down to earth and get grounded with some actually listening. Let’s start with a squeaky version of chick-a-dee:
Sometimes it’s raspier, with a one-part rather than a double introductory note, also known as see-jert-jert:
And sometimes they give simpler single or paired raspy notes:
Some of these are alarm calls, while some are probably some kind of contact call used for staying in touch with the mate or family group. These two general call types can rather blend together and we have not yet deciphered the intricacies of titmouse language.
What is relatively anomalous about the titmouse voice compared to other songbirds is how expressive it sounds to us, to humans – even when we don’t know exactly what they’re saying.. Compare the voice of titmice with your average finch or sparrow. While clear whistle-type voices may sound abstractly nice and “musical,” they can also be rather boring and untextured. Give a kid a penny whistle (and don’t let him finger the stops to produce different pitches either). He may produce a nice clear tone, but that’s about all. Wheeeet! Give the same kid a kazoo, and though he will not produce that clear ringing tone, he will be able to make all kind of funny sounds expressive of indignation, disappointment, depression, or cheerful curiosity. Similarly, when titmice are talking to each other, they sound like they’re saying something. And they do it in such a charmingly squeaky and raspy way.
Or as Dawson put it:
You will hear scraps of conversation in sibilant squeaks and merry day days, which win the ear and delight the heart.
That tone of voice seems so homey, like it’d be capable of gentler emotions if it wasn’t pushed to irritation and insistence. It reminds me of the famously squeaky voice of Jean Arthur, the great 30s comedienne (“it grated like fresh peppermint,” said Edward G. Robinson). For an illustrative scene (and to enhance the general joy of your existence), consider the 1937 classic Easy Living. Through a series of misunderstandings originating in a millionaire throwing his wife’s fur coat off their penthouse roof, from where it descended to land on Jean Arthur’s head while she rode the bus to work, she is now thought to be the mistress to wealth and power. Consequently everyone wants to give her stuff: cars, jewelry, and so on. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. So when she wakes up from the luxury hotel in which she has bafflingly been installed, besieged by telephone salespeople, she attempts politeness, but is ultimately compelled to exclaim in confusion: I want to brush my teeth!
Even if I had no way to tie this back to titmice, I’d still feel I was doing you a service by sharing this with you.
But I do have a titmouse connection to make, which I hope will be illustrative of something universally perceptible even if expressed rather idiosyncratically. We – by which I mean the broad class of humans who enjoy the voices of titmice and Jean Arthur, even if they don’t know it yet – are drawn to raspy squeakiness more than to some clear operatic soprano because it sounds gentler, more approachable, and, for lack of a better word, more human – not alien, not mechanical, not divine – but subject to imperfection and consequent sympathy with the imperfect.
Human, rather than divine. Rather than “glamorized by Hollywood” too. Most movie stars don’t get to wake up bedraggled and confused to exclaim “I want to brush my teeth!” Titmice chatter seems to exist on the same level – not as impractical as the beautiful bird songs which often grab our attention, but instead concerned with day-to-day preoccupations. They have a song – a good, solid song, which gives a general impression of strength and vigor, similar to what Thoreau was hearing when he said that the song of a robin was a “sound to make a dying man live.” But it is when they are not singing, when they are policing their territory, or maintaining contact with their partner, that they seem most relatable.
It is common to hear normal people speak of hearing birds sing, but titmice don’t just sing, they talk.
Does this all sound unscientific, imprecise, roundabout, fanciful, or abstract? Getting to the core of why a sound appeals to us is a tricky task, nearly as difficult as explaining the appeal of a scent or texture. Usually we just slap an adjective on it, perhaps express our parallel reaction, and have to leave it at that: “It’s so raspy! I love that sound!” Here, I’ve tried on a bunch of adjectives and phrases:
Raspy squeakiness
Expressive
Comfortably homey, though irritated and insistent
Reminds me of Jean Arthur
Human and relatable
They talk
Maybe some are more effective than others. Words can’t define a sound: at best they can suggest it. But however incomplete such efforts are, I still think the attempt to evoke a voice in words is worthwhile. It makes us listen more closely, invites us to dwell on and contemplate the pleasures which are freely available to us every day of our lives. There are much worse ways to spend one’s time.
What do I want you to take away from this essay? A little biology: a recognition that grayness correlates to social pattern and that titmice are “the voice and soul of the oaks,” inextricable representatives of this plant community into which our human communities are woven. An attention to how smallness combined with bold assertiveness forms a perennial object for our admiration, a conjunction of qualities that is deservedly entitled “the titmouse dimension.” And a curiosity to listen, to pick out a raspy tone from the anonymous chatter of the finches, to consider why this voice stands apart, and to maybe catch a glimmer of how it manages that final miracle of speaking to you.
Delightful! Thank you, Jack!
I really enjoy and learn from your essays. Thank you!
Thanks Janet!
Wonderful insight into the titmouse. I am curious what might distinguish a fledging at the feeder. I see more titmice now, and they often come in twos and threes, They all seem to have crests. Some cry rather piteously if I am late in filling the mealworm bowl. It is not the usual raspy chick-a-dee sound that is characteristic. Not peter-peter. More squeaky.
Hi Amy,
Good question. While some birds show a plainer or more camouflaged plumage among fledglings, it doesn’t really work for titmice, since it’s hard to get plainer. (For examples of other local baby birds, see this article.) Behavior is usually the best clue: piteous cries (“begging”) are usually the giveaway, often accompanied if the parent is close by wing flapping and beak opening. Watch closely to see if the parents bring food to nearby young: seeing three titmice together at this time of year is suggestive. The most likely difference in plumage that you might be able to see with binoculars is the “gape” of young birds, an unfeathered area around the edge of the beak. Sounds like you have baby titmice – now is the time!