When I was a kid our milk was frequently attacked by marauding gangs of Great Tits and Blue Tits. For younger, perhaps puzzled, readers this was a long time ago in the days when doorstep deliveries of milk were the norm and milk was full fat and the ‘cream’ was noticeable in floating to the top of the bottle.
Here is the great Stanley Cramp slagging off foreign tits for the problem:
That was a long time ago as evidenced by the accents, the dress and the language. I look forward to seeing Andy Clements do a similar interview as his BTO swan song.
The milkman (for ours was a man) was asked to put a stone on top of the milk bottle and I think one could buy plastic caps that could be used for the same function. And I think milk bottle tops were made to be stronger and more bird resistant too.
I do see this as a thing of the past, perhaps because the genes favouring this behaviour died out through the reduction in advantage to the behaviour given the human counter measures. I don’t remember a call for a national cull of Great Tits and Blue Tits – and such a call was never heeded if there was one.
But I see from a quick search online that just as you thought that it was safe to order your milk from a milkman, birds attacks on milk may be making a comeback, and this time it isn’t ‘cute’ tits but ‘evil’ corvids. And bird-attacked milk can be a source of quite nasty tummy upsets.
I’ve heard of this happening in my own rural town here in east Northants but our milk deliveries of either skimmed or semi-skimmed, delivered in batches on three mornings a week, have been spared so far.
It sounds like Jackdaws in our neighbourhood but that is supposition and I haven’t met anyone who has seen this happening. Have you? And I’m surprised that there are no videos of this behaviour that I can find online – but that may be dowen to my incompetence at finding them.
I expect to see tweed-dressed blokes riding shotgun on milkfloats and loosing off shots to waken the neighbourhood as a National Gamekeepers Organisation meet-the-public countermeasure any day now.
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I also remember tit/milk attacks in Wellingborough. We had rubber caps that went over the bottles if the milkman remembered to put them on. Also it was collected from farms in churns then ,not cooled particularly well and even after pasteurisation went off pretty quick. We’ve been drinking UHT skimmed for years which is supposed to be more environmentally friendly.
An impossible question to answer but has the absence of doorstep deliveries reduced tit survival rates?
I’ve had magpies remove fresh putty from windows when I’ve replaced broken glass. I assumed it was the linseed oil that attracted them.
Gary – Blue and GReat Tits are doing fine, even with less milk and more Sparrowhawks!
Perhaps they’re more agile on a low fat diet!
Reminds me of Jennifer Ackerman’s 2016 book “The genius of birds”. Despite sometimes over-stating its case, like an owner with a ‘clever’ dog, it’s basically a very good piece of popular science writing on bird cognition, often in the context of wider research on consciousness and brain function. The tits are, she says, a classic example of social learning in birds, with the first example in Swaythling in 1921 and the behavour spreading to the rest of England and Wales by 1949. Apparently not Scotland, and she does not say whether these birds then ‘invaded’ the continent.
I too remember the tits attacking milk back way back when, before homogenised milk and most folk musing semi skimmed ( actually completely skimmed milk with some cream put back in).
We now have doorstep deliveries to our 2 cottages but the milk is in the porches so no bird attacks, my partner has full fat organic, with cream on top.
We don’t have milk delivered but if we did it would be stolen by some Critter or other just like They take Everything Else and when there is Nothing Left outside they Woodies fly in through the front door through the hall and round the sitting room and out again fortunately so far without shitting everywhere unlike the Robin in the kitchen and as for Blue Tits they exploit wasp feeding damage on the James Grieve which is the most tastiest desert apple of all time and quickly ferments so the Tits have a propensity for alcoholism even if they may have lost their addiction to milk fats
I can remember the 1963 winter. The tits never had it so good because the milk would freeze and push the tops off. No need to peck through the cap.
Yes… the Wildlife Trust Beds/Cambs/Northants office in Cambourne (a new settlement in Cambs) had milk deliverd when I started workign there in 2004… th elocal carrion crows used to open the bottle, tip it and get/spilt about 90% of a bottle..It was semi-skimmed….they picked up this skill very quickly, and it affected other folk in Cambourne, too. Some days we ended up with no milk at all in a morning (quick walk round coner to supermarket needed), some days they would just do one bottle….The milkman switched to plastic in the end, defeating the whole point of having reusable receptacles!
I think as I have no proof that it is the Magpies having fun with my milk tops. I used to have bread delivered but when you have to collect slices of bread from your garden it was just pointless. They have now started to remove the bottle tops. This is a recent occurrence since they changed the tops on my skimmed milk to a very shiny silver and blue. In addition to this I no longer have to set an alarm as I have a magpie tapping on my bedroom window every morning at 7am.
Mary – thank you for your first comment here. You need more Goshawkas – they’d sort out the Magpies and would be unlikely to tap on your window.