Our Little Chickadees

Sticking my head out the door just now between showers, I heard the song of a chickadee. Getting back to work, I found a photo of a chickadee heading up the All about Birds website and learned that the Most Beloved Backyard Bird of 2008 on 10,000 Birds was the chickadee. Everywhere I looked, they were described as "popular," "handsome," "favorite." Apparently I am not the first to notice these tiny beauties. Photographs simply cannot do them justice—cannot capture their adorable roundness, the exquisite details of their coloring and construction. Keep the binoculars trained on your backyard trees on a sunny afternoon and you may get a glimpse of one, or many—they move in flocks.

There are seven chickadee species in North America, nicely arrayed to take advantage of different habitats. Black-capped chickadees have the biggest range, spanning the northern US, including Alaska, and much of Canada. There are gray-headed chickadees, boreal chickadees, Mexican chickadees, and mountain chickadees. In the Southeast there are the Carolina chickadees, which would make a great band name, maybe sharing a bill with the California Honeydrops at Armando’s. And on the California coast, including here in the Bay Area, we have chestnut-backed chickadees (Poecile rufescens). All seven species are small—about five inches long—with big heads on round bodies, dark caps over white cheeks, and distinctive, large black bibs. The rich, reddish brown backs of our local birds distinguish them from other chickadees, which you wouldn’t see around here anyway. Like all passerines—perching birds—they have three toes facing forward and one pointing back, with a strong grip that can hold onto twigs and branchlets as well as more vertical surfaces, such as bark and cones. All the perching birds have leg muscles that automatically tighten if a bird starts to lose its grip, which is why they can sleep while perching.

Seventy-five years ago, there were no chickadees to be seen in the East Bay. In The Birds of California (1923), William Leon Dawson wrote that the chestnut-backed chickadee's range was “the heavy conifer forest of the West, notably…the redwood belt; and the bird’s days are largely passed in wooded depths beyond the reach of common observation.” But by the 1940s the chestnut-backed chickadee was being sighted in Contra Costa County, and in the fifties they spread to Mount Diablo. Why? As usual, it’s about food. As more trees were planted in the formerly dry area between the Santa Clara Valley and the East Bay, eliminating “vegetational discontinuities,” the species was able to make its way into our hospitable habitats, and it now lives here in oak woodlands as well as conifer forests. Not timid about humans, it has also moved into our neighborhoods and can often be found where people have planted redwoods and pines, or pretty much anywhere else where there’s shelter and a good supply of insects, larvae, and seeds.

Keeping a backyard feeder well supplied with seeds, especially black sunflower seeds, will help you get to know your local chickadees, which are otherwise hard to spot. As Dawson wrote, the chickadee “refuses to look down for long upon the world; or, indeed, to look at any one thing from any one direction for more than two consecutive twelfths of a second;…be it a pine cone, an alder catkin, or a bug-bearing branchlet, top side, bottom side, inside, outside, all is right side to the nimble chickadee.” You’ll know they’re in the neighborhood by their call, which to my ears is similar to the call of the oak titmouse, who is very likely to be around at the same time. Here’s a link to the call of the chestnut-backed chickadee. It has been transcribed as a "high, thin, scratchy 'chick-a-dee'" (allaboutbirds,org), “tsidi-tsidi-tsidi-cheer-cheer” (David Allen Sibley), “a sharp tsiti-tchee-tchee” (enature.com), etc. If you find these transcriptions as amusing as I do, you might enjoy the hilarious video Sh*t Birders Say on YouTube. 

For more information on backyard bird feeding, here’s a link to Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch. 

And finally, at about 2:20 in the following clip from If I Had a Million, you can hear W. C. Fields saying “my little chickadee” on film for the first time. ‪