Length: About 6 inches; a little smaller than the English sparrow.

General Appearance: A slender, active, gray and white bird, with a crest. Its reddish-brown sides are not visible at a distance. The titmouse need never be confused with the waxwing; it is much smaller, and lacks the yellow and red markings on tail and wings.

Male and Female: Head conspicuously crested; crest gray and pointed; forehead black; bill short, sharp, black; back, wings, and tail gray; under parts whitish, with a reddish-brown wash on the sides.

Call-note: De-de-de-de, similar to one of the chickadee’s notes, but louder.

Song: A loud, sweet, clear whistle: Pe’-to, pe’-to, pe’-to, pe’-to, pe’-to, frequently repeated five times. The titmouse is called locally the “Peter-bird.”

Habitat: Woodlands; open groves of hard-wood trees preferred.

Range: Rare in New England. From Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, south to central Texas, the Gulf Coast, and Florida; occasional in Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, and Connecticut. Common permanent resident near Washington, especially in winter.

No winter bird more truly exemplifies protective coloring than the lively crested Tomtit, unless it be his little cousin, the Black-capped Chickadee. This sober-hued titmouse is such a blending of the grays and blacks of tree-trunk and icy brook, of the dazzling white of snow and the soft gray shadows that lie across it, of reddish-brown shrubs and weeds, that he might escape notice except for his conspicuous crest. He can be distinguished from the cedar waxwing at a glance by his reddish sides, and because of the absence of a yellow band across the tail and of conspicuous black, white, and red patches or markings.

Few more active birds exist than titmice. They are at once the envy and the despair of aspiring small boys who know them, because of their extreme agility—their ability to perform acrobatic feats. They swing head downward from twigs in the search for their favorite food of insect-eggs; they seem strung on wires.

In the woodlands frequented by tufted titmice, they are as much in evidence as blue jays, because of their loud, clear peto-peto-peto-peto-peto, a welcome and pleasant sound during belated spring days or a bleak March “sugaring-off” season.

They are less friendly than chickadees, but are not shy, so they can be observed easily. They are very sociable with their kind, and are found, “playing around” with chickadees, nuthatches, and downy woodpeckers in the winter-time, and snuggling close together in old nest-holes during winter weather. In the spring, titmice use hollowed trees for their nesting sites and have been known to welcome a nesting-box.

These birds do enormous good, not only in eating insect-eggs, but in destroying caterpillars, cutworms, beetles, weevils, flies, wasps, plant-lice, and scale-insects in their season.[28] They will eat berries, nuts, and acorns during the winter and are extremely hardy.