A garden full of Mumruffins

My garden is currently alive with Mumruffins.

Maybe you come from Nottingham and call them Bum Barrels, or from Norfolk and call them Pudding Bags, but I'm from Worcestershire so Mumruffins it will stay.

In a birdbook you're stuck with the rather more prosaic Long-tailed Tit, and I have to say I have a rather soft spot for them.

A troupe of about a dozen - which will be an extended family party - passes through my garden most days, but of late they have become constant companions.

The number of times they return to the feeders, maybe once every half an hour, reveals why they are so dependable recently. And what they love more than anything is to cluster inside the fat feeder and gorge on fatty nibbles. Up to seven can squeeze in at a time, but here are three.

They have recently taken to eating sunflower hearts as well, and for this they need to take one seed at a time in their tiny bills and fly off to a nearby branchlet where they then hang upside down clutching the seed in one foot in order to hammer little fragments off it.

They even visit the peanut feeder, and here you can see just how tiny and short their wings are, and how flexible that incredibly long tail is when they fly.

During the breeding season they construct their incredible domed nest from feathers, lichen and spider silk, the origin of the Pudding Bag and Bum Barrel names. The female alone incubates the eggs, and squeezed into the dome her tail can get permanently curved during the hours of sitting.

But now in February it is just a case of enjoying their bubbly little personalities, always in conversation with other with calls that erupt into 'sirrut sirrut' when anxious and an even more petrified 'seeee-seeee-seeee' when the Sparrowhawk appears.

Little Mumruffins, eh?!