PARUS MAJOR AND THE LONG LEGGED FLY

The Great tit (Parus major) on the following photograph ...

... has built the nest in the dry stone wall of the building once used as a barn, the last one of that kind in my neighborhood ... and one of the last few in my hometown.
Every day I can hear the nestlings tweeting from somewhere in the wall, about a meter above my head, and sometimes I see the adult birds bringing food to them.

The young chicks are fed by both parents. This time the female was ready to bring a pretty big, long-legged crane fly.
In this period of nesting and abundance these birds are primarily insectivorous. A wide variety of Insects, snails and spiders are their main source of food during the spring and summer ... but ...

... In autumn and winter, when insect prey becomes scarcer and then practically non-existent, great tits add berries and seeds to their diet.
I learned quite a few interesting and unexpected facts about this bird's diet from the Wikipedia article while preparing this post.
Large food items, such as large seeds or prey, are dealt with by "hold-hammering", where the item is held with one or both feet and then struck with the bill until it is ready to eat. Using this method, a great tit can get into a hazelnut in about twenty minutes. When feeding the young, adults will hammer off the heads of large insects to make them easier to consume, and remove the gut from caterpillars so that the tannins in the gut will not retard the chick's growth.
Great tits combine versatility of their diet with a considerable amount of intelligence and the ability to solve problems with insight learning, they are able to solve problems through insight rather than trial and error. According to Wikipedia, somewhere In England, great tits learned to break the foil caps of milk bottles delivered at the doorstep of homes to obtain the cream at the top. This behavior, first noted in 1921, spread rapidly in the next two decades. In 2009, in Hungary, great tits were reported killing, and eating the brains of roosting bats. This is the first time a songbird has been recorded preying on bats. The tits only do this during winter when the bats are hibernating and other food is very scarce. They have also been recorded using a tool ... the conifer needle in the bill to extract larvae from a hole in a tree.

I had no idea that, when it comes to their intelligence and behavior, these little singing birds have so much in common with birds like crows and magpies.

As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work ... the information about the bird's behavior came from this article : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit