Head to head
Great Tit vs Blue Tit
The great tit and the blue tit are the two tits most people see in a European garden, usually together on the same feeder. They are close relatives with similar lives, both nesting in holes and boxes and both timing their broods to the spring caterpillar peak, but they are easy to tell apart on size and head pattern.
| Great Tit | Blue Tit | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | About 14 cm, chunky | About 11 to 12 cm, dainty |
| Cap | Glossy blue-black, with white cheeks | Sky blue, with a white face and dark eye-line |
| Breast | Yellow with a black central stripe | Plain yellow, no stripe |
| Back | Greenish | Blue-green with blue wings and tail |
| Song | Loud, ringing teacher-teacher, very varied | Thin, high tsee-tsee-tsu and a trill |
| Vocabulary | Around 40 distinct calls | A smaller set of calls |
| Nest-box hole | About 28 mm | About 25 mm |
| At the feeder | Dominant; displaces smaller tits | Gives way to the great tit |
Great Tit vs Blue Tit: common questions
What is the quickest way to tell a great tit from a blue tit?
Look at the head and the breast. A great tit has a solid black cap that continues down the neck, framing large clean white cheeks, and its yellow breast is split by a black stripe running from the throat to the legs. A blue tit has a small blue cap, a mostly white face with just a thin dark line through the eye, and a plain yellow breast with no stripe at all. Size backs this up, as the great tit is clearly the larger, bulkier bird and the blue tit is small and light. If you can only see the bird briefly, the black head-and-tie of the great tit versus the blue-and-white face of the blue tit is the fastest single cue.
What does the black stripe on a great tit mean?
It works as a badge of rank. The stripe is widest, longest, and glossiest in dominant, well-fed adult males, and narrower and duller in females, young birds, and subordinate males. Other great tits appear to read it, so a bird with a bold stripe wins more disputes at feeders and defends a territory more successfully, and experiments in which the stripe was artificially widened with a marker changed how rivals responded. The stripe therefore advertises fighting ability and condition honestly, which lets many contests be settled by display rather than by an actual fight. The blue tit has no equivalent breast badge, though the brightness of its blue crown, which reflects ultraviolet light, seems to carry a similar signal.
Do great tits and blue tits compete with each other?
Yes, but they coexist well because they do not overlap completely. They compete most directly for nest holes and boxes in spring, and the larger great tit usually wins, sometimes evicting or even killing a blue tit that has already started a nest, which is why boxes intended for blue tits use a 25 mm entrance hole too small for a great tit to enter. At feeders the great tit is dominant and makes the blue tit wait its turn. Away from those flashpoints the two feed slightly differently, with the lighter blue tit working the outermost twigs and leaf undersides while the heavier great tit takes more food from larger branches and the ground, so both can thrive in the same wood or garden.