A small bird of lowland and low-mountain woods in Japan. Its bluish-grey wings and chestnut belly stand out.
The wings are bluish-grey, with chestnut areas on the back and belly. Males and females have similar colours.
Varied tits carry fruits away from Japanese snowbell branches. They also sometimes hold fruits with their feet on a branch, break them with their bills and eat the seeds.
A study published in 2006 examined fruit transport and seed germination at Mount Takadate near Tsuruoka, Yamagata, Japan. During four observation days in September 2004, varied tits were the only animals visiting the monitored branch, and carrying fruits away was more common than eating them there.
For the germination experiment, researchers compared manually depulped seeds with intact fruits. They sowed one hundred of each in a nursery in autumn 2003. By the following spring and early summer, 36% of depulped seeds had germinated, compared with 4% of intact fruits. In contrast, neither treatment germinated in a shaded woodland site by the following July. The subsequent germination of this food resource differed markedly with the presence of fruit pulp and the planting environment.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
A 2011 study at Kinki University’s Nara campus observed varied tits carrying Japanese snowbell seeds and caching them in the ground. The researchers considered conserving these food trees relevant to local tit conservation. Their 2013 paper proposed periodic woodland management to maintain brighter patches, while balancing thinned and unthinned areas to protect rare organisms associated with shaded forest.