5 July—If you want to see great tits, you’d do well (to say the least) to visit Oxford University.

Women had been admitted to study at Oxford in 1879 but weren’t allowed to take degrees until 1920. In the good old days, there were only five constituent women’s colleges at the university, among about a score of men’s colleges. That changed in the early seventies, when four of the men’s colleges, anticipating a mandate of the Labour government that was screwing up the United Kingdom at the time, became the first to proactively also admit women.

Oxford women’s colleges, however, didn’t begin to admit men until the end of that decade. The left-wing mandate never came. And the last women’s college to admit men waited until 2008, while the last men’s college (really a Benedictine permanent private hall) didn’t admit women until 2016. And two Cambridge colleges remain exclusively female.

Back in Oxford, the university has long been celebrated for its ground-breaking biological research and now offers a postgraduate degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, among other silly subjects.

Great tits didn’t come into the picture at Oxford until 1947, a little more than a year after Louis Réard invented and patented the bikini. The delay may be attributed to the facts that Réard, an automotive engineer, introduced his minimally protective swimsuit in Paris rather than Oxford and didn’t fashion it from tweed.

That takes us to Wytham Woods, a secluded, mostly natural forest owned by Oxford University, where lots of wildlife carries on and lots of research is carried out. It’s a so-called Site of Special Scientific Interest. It’s very special indeed.

Wytham is pronounced “White‘em,” by the way, but without the “h”; not “with’em,” as Diana Rigg mispronounced it when she introduced what must have been one of the Inspector Morse or Inspector Lewis episodes on left-wing television’s Masterpiece Theatre many years ago. She should have known better. Alistair Cooke, although a Cambridge man, would nevertheless have pronounced Wytham correctly.

Oxford University is very proud of its great tits, as well it should be, and even boasts about them on its website: OXFORD CELEBRATES 75 YEARS OF GREAT TIT RESEARCH AT WYTHAM WOODS.

Donald Trump was just shy of a year old at the time Oxford’s great tit research began in April 1947, when “the first eggs were laid in a population of great tits that was just beginning to be studied,” as the website tells us. “The Wytham Great Tit Study is the longest continuous study of an individually-marked animal population in the world.”

Truly impressive. Really. Of course, there’s a lot more than great tits being studied in Wytham Woods. But, according to the ornithology professor studying the great tits, the first of their eggs of 2022 were laid in Wytham Woods on 28 March, just one day short of a month earlier than in 1947. Thanks to global warming . . .