Meet Your Neighbors

Black-capped Chickadee:
Scrappy, Smart, and Winterized

Keep your ears open during your next visit to a local wooded area and you are likely to hear a common resident introducing itself with an unmistakable, bright call: chick-a-dee-dee-dee!

The five-inch-long black-capped chickadee, Poecile atricapillus, with its distinctive black cap and bib, white and tan body, and olive-grey wings, lives in woodlands and backyards across the northern United States and southern Canada. While many bird species head south for the winter, chickadees generally remain in the Chicago region year-round. “You look at this tiny little ball of fluff on a winter’s day, and you marvel that they can survive it,” says Downers Grove birder Bob Fisher.

The chickadees cope with the cold by fluffing up their thick feathers to trap warm air close to their bodies. On cold winter nights, they roost close together in sheltered spots, and even drop their body temperatures by more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit to conserve energy.

Or perhaps survival hinges on keeping a good attitude. In 1936, Birds of America called the chickadee “the feathered small boy of the winter-time,” noting that “in the bitterest weather he frolics and frisks from tree to tree, happy and care-free, laughing and joking.”

Scientists have learned a great deal about the bird’s behavior, if not its true inner feelings. One 2005 study by Christopher Templeton at the University of Washington found that chickadee warning calls can convey surprisingly complex information. A call of seet warns of a bird of prey in flight. The distinctive chick-a-dee-dee-dee announces the presence of a stationary predator and encourages chickadees and other small birds to “mob” the intruder. Subtle variations in this alarm tell other chickadees about the severity of the threat, with smaller, more agile predators eliciting the most urgent warnings.

“It’s been my favorite bird ever since I started birding,” says 12-year-old Matt Karabetsos of Naperville, who has birdwatched since he was nine. “When you put up a new feeder, if chickadees are in the area, they always seem to be the first ones at the feeder,” he says. “When we put up a tubular feeder, there were chickadees there in about 15 seconds. It took the other birds a day or two to figure it out.”

In the wild, chickadees feed on insects, spiders, snails, slugs, and seeds. Their stout yet pointed bill can pull a grub from a bark crevice as easily as it can punch through the thick wall of a goldenrod gall to extract the gall fly larva overwintering inside. One of few bird species that can hang upside down on tree trunks and branches as they search for food, chickadees leave no culinary opportunity uninvestigated. The birds rarely eat their food where they find it, though, and often stash seeds and other morsels for later. They can remember thousands of hiding spots. One study even found that the birds actually grew more brain cells each fall to improve their spatial memory. Their memory has to be sharp — to feed their tiny furnaces through the winter, chickadees eat 20 times more food than the rest of the year.

Black-capped chickadees nest in holes in dead trees, and will also take advantage of nesting boxes. They’ll even excavate a new hole, the male and female typically cooperating for up to two weeks in the effort. Karabetsos watched a pair one spring as they lined their nest with moss and fur, fed the chicks, and coaxed the last fledgling out of the nest by tempting it with a juicy mealworm.

According to a study by the Bird Conservation Network of local bird populations, black-capped chickadee numbers declined 5 percent between 1997 and 2004. Most notably, West Nile Virus silenced many centers of chickadee activity in 2003, when their numbers dropped suddenly. They seem to have bounced back since that time, however, leaving chickadee fans looking forward to another winter in the company of this charming bird.

— Stephanie Folk

Related Articles:

West Nile Virus Decimates Black-capped Chickadees, CW, Winter 2003