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Male and Female Great Tits Built Winter Pair Bonds Differently

Great tit photographed in Lancashire, United Kingdom
Research · Behaviour

Wild great tits (Parus major) in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, England, were followed through three winters to test how pair formation changes the rest of their social lives. The study asked how birds divide their social associations between a future breeding partner and other flock members when social time is limited. Automatic readers at feeding stations recorded individually marked birds using RFID tags, and the researchers then identified which birds bred together the following spring.

Both males and females increasingly associated with their future breeding partner as winter progressed. Among pairs that were already established, however, the partner accounted for a larger proportion of males’ total social associations than of females’.

Age also mattered when new pairs formed. Among juveniles, the future partner’s share of social associations increased more over winter in males than in females. At the same time, juvenile males experienced less change in the membership of their wider social groups while accommodating the developing pair bond.

The results show that pair bonding does not develop separately from the rest of a bird’s social life. Great tits spend winter in loose social groups that repeatedly split and merge, so strengthening one relationship can change how an individual invests in others. Sex and age influenced how the birds managed that balance, even though both males and females increased their association with the partner they would breed with.

Sources and image credit

  1. Rabin, G. H. T., Abraham, A. D., Bi, T., McMahon, K., Sheldon, B. C., & Firth, J. A. (2026). Sex-based differences in social trade-offs in a wild bird society. Animal Behaviour, 239, 123681. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123681Primary peer-reviewed article. Wild great tits in Wytham Woods were followed across three winters to test how sex and age shaped trade-offs between association with future breeding partners and other social ties.

Image: Francis Franklin / Wikimedia Commons — great tit in Lancashire, United Kingdom, 24 January 2015. Representative image for this story; not presented as an animal or scene from the reported study or event. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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