Can blue tits stillopen milk bottles? (1 Viewer)

[James Thomas]

30 years ago in this weather my breakfast milk would have been contaminated by blue tits and great tits enjoying the cream. Always get milk fromthe supermarche these days, but are they still up to the task?

 

[Barred Wobbler]

Only if they can break into the fridge and handle a screw top.

 

[Watts]

We used to have bottles regularly attacked by tits and, I think, Magpies. But although we still get doorstep deliveries we haven't had any damage for a few years. I wonder if it stopped when we switched to semi-skimmed? And if so how long did it take the tits to recognise that they would get no cream?

Bill

 

[bitterntwisted]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/blue-tits-lose-their-bottle-as-milk-thieves-578134.html

 

[dantheman]

Surprising that it just died out in some respects. Maybe it conferred no evolutionary advantage, but was just a game they played*. Or it was an evolutionary disadvantage, and all the Bluetits engaging in the practise died out from aluminium poisoning.


(* Maybe the mice observing the human race (See Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) temporarily employed the Blue Tits as an experiment to observe the effect on adult humans of having someone stealing their milk- lots of fascination, but no mass war or hysteria; and then experiment over. Purpose served.)

 

[colonelboris]

I wonder if a Blue Tit's system can handle lactose? If not, then that explains that...

 

[Sancho]

I remember as a kid in the sixties someone gave me a book called "Animal Behaviour" full of Konrad Lorenz and Chimpanzees trying to suckle from a wire-cage dummy-mummy while also trying to hang onto a more comfortable furry dummy-mummy...you know the kind of thing. Anyway, I was really excited by a map that showed the incidences of blue-tits doing the milk-bottle trick, it showed the British Isles and there were lots of little red dots all over England and Wales where this had been reported, but only very few dots on the map of Ireland. And then....they started doing it on our doorstep! (Which suggests that different populations discovered it independently, no? Blue-tits hardly migrate across the Irish Sea to teach each other tricks). Anyway, glass milk-bottles died out here in the eighties, and despite a short-lived attempt at revival towards the end of the nineties, milk delivery in general is a thing of the past. I suppose it´s not so much a case of the blue-tits giving up the practice, as the practice being made impossible for them.

 

[NoSpringChicken]

Thinking about the amount of time I spend struggling with those fiddly plastic tags on the top of milk cartons and the number which break off before I reach the contents, a resident Blue Tit with the knack of opening them would be a godsend. I guess the thieving Blue Tit is a phenomenon which ended with the introduction of milk cartons, an act which also brought about the loss of the simple pleasure of watching your frozen milk thawing out on the school radiator, with the cap pushed off by ice.

Ron

 

[PhilW]

Out of interest my father took this photo through our letter box when we lived in Cumbria around 1963. I was only 2 years old so couldn't reach the letter box myself! It wasn't only Blue Tits.

 

[kingfisher]

I have not heard of anyone seeing Blue Tits or any other bird of recents years doing this, maybe this is due to the fact that most of us now get our Milk from Supermarkets.

But I can remember as a young kid watching them opening Milk bottles, maybe we should be leaving cream out for them on bird tables as well.

 

[pcurpb]

I always understood it was because
a) there are far fewer home deliveries these days &
b) they just don't dig skimmed or semi-skimmed milk, now far more prevalent.

Come to think of it, magpies used to do the same thing, didn't they? And have also desisted?

 

[Jabberwocky]

The increase in the amount of readily available sunflower seed and fat balls over the last 30 years may have had something to do with it too.