Specie's Page                                               Bearded Reedling - Birds of the Waters Edge

Bearded Reedling:

UK Status: Resident, with about seven hundred breeding pairs in the UK. More can be seen in spring and autumn when some birds from Europe are migrating.

Habitat: This bird inhabits extensive and mainly coastal reed beds during the breeding season, around the waters edge, as part of it's name suggests. Sometimes a few birds are spotted elsewhere during the late autumn, through to early spring.

Breeding: Nests are placed well inside reed beds, quite low down and are interwoven with the reeds as support. They are constructed from reeds for the outer shell, the cup inside is lined with dry grasses. The normally lay four eggs, which are of an olive brown, with blackish brown blotches and squiggles, mainly toward the broader end.

Comment: The Bearded Reedling is also known as the Bearded Tit, the male and female birds are sexually dimorphic, as you can see. They are not particularly common, at least partly due to the loss of wetlands over the last few decades. Most observers only get fleeting glimpses of these birds. They deep within the reed bed, perching on top of the reeds for mere seconds at time. They are a devil to photograph, as my pictures will confirm.