Many great tits, pictured, are now sitting on eggs in their mossy nests in holes in trees and in nestboxes. The news announced on Thursday that they are adapting themselves individually to warmer springs is very good indeed.

It has been feared for a long time that the climate change would lead to one of two possible disastrous results. Great tits feed their young in the nest mainly on the caterpillars of the winter moth, which are found in spring in vast numbers on the leaves of oak trees. Before the warmer springs began to occur, the hatching of the young great tits and the hatching of the caterpillars always more or less coincided, so there was food in abundance for the young birds.

The fears were that the early onset of warm weather would lead either to the caterpillars coming on to the leaves too early for the birds, or the birds coming into breeding condition too early for the caterpillars. Either of these situations would have caused havoc for the great tits.

The birds might, of course, have adjusted through the process of evolution, with the better-adapted birds slowly becoming the majority of the great tit population. But that would have taken a very long time.

Now, however, Oxford scientists have shown that not only are the caterpillars appearing earlier, but that the great tits have managed to adjust as individuals to the new situation by nesting earlier as well. As far as the great tits are concerned, the community of nature has changed with its parts still in harmony with each other. So the future for great tits looks much more secure. And the discovery may prove to apply to other endangered birds too.

There have been two more interesting discoveries recently about birds. Julia Carter, a PhD student at Bristol University, has found that starlings know when people are looking at them. You can stand quite near a food dish they are eating from, and they will ignore you — until you turn your eyes on them. Then they move away. Perhaps they can always detect the attentive eyes of predators.

In Madrid they have discovered that blue tits can actually smell predators. When scientists there put ferret smells into nestboxes which had chicks in them, the parent tits waited measurably longer before entering the dark boxes with food.

Altogether, it seems, birds can look after themselves better than we have realised.

derwent.may@thetimes.co.uk

What to look out for

Great crested grebes are now out on the water with their young, the offspring, like as not, preferring to cadge a lift on their mother’s back rather than swim themselves. While they are still tiny, they can hide themselves completely in the parental plumage, their striped heads popping up from time to see how the land lies

— Details from Birdline, 0906 8700222 (60p a min)