Young Mouths How often are young birds fed, and how
many times in the course of a day? Only the very patient observer, watching from dawn to dusk, could, I suppose, give an approximately reliable answer. But even a very casual observation, first of a tom-tit's nest in a hole in a stone wall by a Pitmaston Duchess pear, and secondly of a young cuckoo in a hedge-sparrow's in a hedge of lonicera nitida, gave a little idea of the miraculous energy of the process. The pace at which the young tits were fed seemed to vary between visits of thirty seconds and four minutes. Occasionally both parents arrived with food together. Both were extremely nervous, and it is probable that, left entirely alone, they returned more often than every two minutes, which seemed a fair average. This represented thirty visits an hour, or apparently, allowing a fifteen-hour day in midsummer, between four and five hundred meals a day. The young cuckoo seemed, if anything, to be fed rather more frequently : often once a minute, rarely less often than two minutes. The average seemed to be about forty times an hour, or apparently between six and seven hundred meals a day. This is prodigious when it is remembered that, though there may have been as many as eight or more young tits to be fed, there was only one cuckoo. None of these figures is advanced as a proof of anything, incredible though it seems, and how many miles of flight each case represented it would be still more difficult to say. But it has been reliably estimated that a pair of long-tailed tits might travel, in a fortnight of nest-building alone,, something like 700 miles.
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