I have previously written at length on the titmouse, a charming bird of raspy voice, lively demeanor, and exceptional plainness that patrols our oak woodlands in inseparable pairs. In that essay, I mentioned the chickadee, our other local representative of the family Paridae. At first glance these birds may appear quite different, at least to novices: one is plain gray and crested, the other boldly marked and round-headed. Those differences in appearance are indeed the clearest demarcation of the two constituent branches of the family: parids are either crested titmice or black-and-white-faced chickadees.
As I discussed in the titmouse essay, these differences in appearance often align with a difference in social pattern, with the plain titmice maintaining their year-round pair bond while the contrasting colors of chickadees are thought to function as badges of health and fitness, which are more important for more social birds. We often think of how birds have pretty plumage to display their health to potential mates, but such signals also apply to rivals or flock mates. Chickadees, unlike oak titmice, gather into flocks for much of the year, with clear hierarchies in which these physical markers play an important role.
There is, however, a great deal that these two birds have in common. Both are cavity-nesters with squeaky voices and versatile feeding habits, comfortable pursuing insects in a variety of modes (gleaning from bark, twigs, leaves) and eating seeds and nuts (including at birdfeeders). Even the names get mixed up once you step out of the cut-and-dried rules of the American Ornithologists Union. You might have caught the nomenclatural ambiguity in how I quoted Emerson’s poem entitled “The Titmouse” in my essay of that name, even though the poem was based upon an encounter with the bird now known as the black-capped chickadee. When my old friend John Kirk Townsend discovered the chestnut-back in 1836, he named it “the chestnut-backed titmouse.” The parid confusion can also be seen in European members of the family, many of whom have similar face badging to our chickadees, but are commonly known as tits. The nomenclatural divide is in part a mere product of modern political jurisdiction.
The point is that chickadees and titmice are distinctly similar, but not entirely the same. They look different (superficially), they live in different places (sometimes), their voices are distinct (though there is a resemblance), and their feeding styles are distinguishable (though they work with similar tool sets). I’ll discuss habitat and voice at length in a moment, but let’s look at feeding styles briefly. Both titmice and chickadees practice some of the same techniques. A signature move of both is the classic “hold the food between your feet on a perch while breaking it open with your beak” – no clumsy, rustic finch of stunted intellect has mastered that skill – but overall chickadees are the more flexible and multi-talented of the two.
I still remember a lecture at Berkeley when Professor Nick Mills was discussing various eaters of insects, many of which were other insects of very focused and specific skill sets and prey types. Then, as if to utter a major disclaimer, he spoke the word: “Chickadees,” he said, pausing significantly, “are underrated predators.” No bug can hide from them. When watching their skillful hunting, you quickly realise how many different approaches they have, compared to most birds who have only one or two modes of eating.
When I was coming up through the ranks in my martial arts study, my grandmaster told us that to become a perfect master one must be well versed in three martial arts. My system is Korean, so Taekwondo for punching and kicking; Hapkido for throws, takedowns, and locks; and Kumdo (a Korean form of fencing) for weapons training.
– Jon Engum, Taekwondo Grandmaster
Titmice are black belts in bark and branch-gleaning, with solid qualifications in nut-cracking. Nimble bushtits are black belts in clinging upside down on the extreme distal end of twigs to snatch bugs from foliage. Yellow-rumped warblers are pretty good at that, and easily exceed these rivals at flycatching, briefly leaving the tree to dash out and grab prey in mid-air. Chickadees can do all of these. Their flycatching, admittedly, is perhaps not black belt level, but they are the only one of their peers to excel in bark gleaning, foliage gleaning, and seed-cracking.
They are well-rounded, indefatigable little Odysseuses, “skilled in all ways of contending,” “birds of many turnings.” Watch them at work, even on birdfeeders: they can cling at any angle, seemingly held in position by magnets which can engage and disengage at will, suddenly snapping into place in the precise location of their target, then momentarily relaxing for a brief second before becoming effortlessly reattached in another position.
Next up, geography and habitat. Let’s start with situating ourselves in the chickadee cosmos. The lone chickadee in question in the Bay Area is the chestnut-backed chickadee, a specialist in moist coastal forests that lives along much of the California coast and northward all the way to Alaska, but doesn’t venture inland to the even colder forests of the mountains or northern interior, where they are displaced by various other species, like the black-capped, mountain, and boreal chickadees. Chestnuts like to stay comfortable.
Along that long stretch, Marin was historically the major border in chestnut-backed geography, with the population divided into three subspecies of slightly different plumage: one to the north, one to the south, and our very own “Marin Chickadee” in the moist forests from Nicasio to Point Reyes. The dividing gaps between subspecies were thought to be caused by gaps in traversable tree cover. Here in Novato, I live in what was historically the eye of the chickadee hurricane, a vacant hole that has since been fortunately filled as human tree-planting allowed northern birds to cross the open grasslands of southern Sonoma. Phew! It was a close call: if I had lived here a hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have any chickadees outside my door.
All that is evergreen
So we know that our chestnut-backed chickadees need trees, favoring the more substantial forests found near the coast rather than drier, more open woodlands found further inland in California. But to really plumb the depths of both chickadee and titmouse appreciation, it is valuable to understand the big picture of their respective geographic distributions.
The broad, generalizing conclusion? Chickadees go to the north, the mountains, and the coast (in the case of chestnut-backs), while titmice stay southerly, preferring mid-elevation hills or oak-clad Mexican mountains, because chickadees are birds of the forests, titmice birds of the woods.
When a Californian says “the woods” he usually means an oak woodland, or at least a hardwood growth. When he says “the forest” he commonly means dense coniferous stands, timber land, usually found in the mountains.
– Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Western Trees
My immediate disclaimer, to avoid confusion, is to clarify that chestnut-backed chickadees and oak titmice often overlap here in the Bay Area, usually in denser live oak woodlands. The chickadees take the conifer forests; the titmice tend to dominate the drier, more open, deciduous oak woodlands; and while either can sometimes establish a foothold on the margins of the opposite territory, there is also a substantial middle ground where both can thrive.
What does it mean to be a bird of the forest? It means that you are less tied to the acorns of the oak titmice: chickadees can eat seeds, but favor smaller ones, such as those of conifers. It means that you spend more time aloft and rarely if ever go to the ground, which in the shaded understory of redwood and other forests is generally less teeming with food sources than in the overall lower elevation world of the oak woodland. And it means you have winter in your blood, rejoice in snow and cold, and are a fit companion to the undying conifers.
The fields are bleak, and they are, as it were, vacated. The very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and I go knocking about it in vain. But just then I heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered… All that is evergreen in me revived at once.
– Thoreau, The Journal
Look at those maps above again. You can see how titmice become more diverse around the southwest, entering into deserts and into the dry oak woodlands of Mexico. In contrast, black-capped chickadees stay north in cold New England winters when many things flee south, while the mountain and boreal chickadees endure high elevation and high latitude winters of snow-covered quietude. Compared with these, our chestnut-backs live in very mild conditions. But that is the heritage they grew out of, not one of heat and dryness, but one of cold and moisture. Where do you belong?
Personally, I’m more of a titmouse kind of person, as my essay on that bird probably made clear. I love chickadees, and I love the forest, but ultimately I’m more at home among the oaks. Fortunately, we don’t have to make an exclusive commitment, because the chestnut-backed chickadee is not an extreme aficionado of the uncomfortable, but a relatively fair-weather sort, for a chickadee. In other words: they like the woods of coastal California too.
Of course, we are not utterly without seasons. Chickadee behavior changes to reflect the coming of winter even here in California. And it’s a cheerier experience, at least from our perspective, compared to the tales of those New England transcendentalists of lonely winter walks when no birds were heard except for chickadees.
[I thought I was going to die in the frozen snowy woods…]
When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chic-chicadeedee! saucy note
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said, ‘Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings few faces.’
– Emerson, “The Titmouse” (actually about the black-capped chickadee)
(Incidentally, it’s worth keeping in mind the general fact that this leading transcendentalist duo, probably the two most notable prophets of self-reliance and nonconformity American letters have yet produced, were both massive chickadee fans. Pure coincidence? Or is this the bird that would have written Civil Disobedience and Life without Principle, Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul, could its chick-dee-dee be translated and transcribed?)
No, although those Massachusetts chickadees kept their spirits up with admirable positivity during the seasonal exodus from the forest, it is not something our chestnut-backs have to deal with. Instead, their social life grows livelier in fall, when the pairs and then family groups of spring and summer coalesce into larger flocks, containing both additional chickadees and birds of other species. Emerson was cheered to encounter a single chickadee in the desolation of January; we get to be cheered on our wintry woodland walks when suddenly we run into a boisterous and sudden, seemingly endless mixed-species flock, with half a dozen chickadees in the vanguard of vireos, kinglets, creepers, bushtits, nuthatches, wrens, and maybe a Townsend’s warbler or two to bring some class into the assembly.
A mixed flock is a wonderful thing. Think of it: half a dozen species, dozens of birds, all travelling and feeding and communicating more or less as equals. Humans have often enlisted other species as adjuncts or labor or companions, but to spontaneously gather together in collaboration with a number of creatures who are different than ourselves – that is outside of our experience.
Chickadees are the ringleaders of this impromptu alliance, the glue that holds together its motley members, and the perpetual energy source that propels it on and on through the boundless woods of winter.
This atom in full breath
Let’s resume the Emersonian encounter:
Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
As if to shame my weak behavior;
Tiny but voluble, an atom always cheeping and squeaking. Listening to chickadees makes me feel like Don Armado in Love’s Labours Lost, speaking with his precociously articulate but diminutive page Moth: I feel prompted to utter vocative exclamations of extreme satisfaction and quasi-paternal pride like “dear imp!”, “tender juvenal!”, and “well-educated infant!” We big people thought we were the eloquent ones, armed with the vast vocabularies of experience, but these little chickadees have more freshness in their dialogue; their words are never stale.
This talkativeness of chickadees is legendary. It is, after all, the origin of their name: “chickadee” is a pleasant onomatopoeic rendering of their most distinctive call:
Now, there are many birds that are named after two-syllable calls: curlew, willet, killdeer, poorwill, phoebe, towhee, and the like. And some that are named after calls of one syllable (jay) or a general description of their primary sound (hummingbird). But a three-syllable name like chickadee is relatively rare, and that points to something unique about chickadee speech: these birds have words and they have syntax, with those words combined in specific orders and patterns of determinate meaning. In English we put our direct object pronouns after the verb, in French we put them before, and in Chickadee we never say “dee-chick-a.” That would clearly be nonsensical gibberish.
Admittedly, Chickadee is not a language of extremely extensive vocabulary. “Chick-a-dee” suggests three words in the lexicon, while most species can pull a fourth word out for special occasions, and some have mastered as many as six. But with those three or four words they can express a range of meanings by omitting or repeating given notes, while never varying the order: “chick-a-dee” means something different than “chick-dee-dee,” for instance. For more on this subject, I heartily recommend the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America by Nathan Pieplow. The guide’s companion website is open to anyone to explore (see the chickadee page here), but the book has streamlined sonograms, invaluable sound classifications, and lots of generally useful supplemental text.
How about a song? Some chickadees have clear whistled songs, a two-syllabled fee-bee in black-caps and three-syllabled fee-bee-bee in the mountain chickadees of the Sierras, but our chestnut-backs are not so musical. They do have a “gurgle” song and a “trill” song of simple repeated notes, both thought to function in aggressive situations or close-range courtship, and so heard comparatively infrequently broadcast to the woods at large.
Why should our chickadee be less musically-inclined than the other chickadees of California? I have no idea. But as long as they continue to “chick-a-dee” I will be satisfied. “Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird?” Thoreau asked himself upon hearing the spring whistle song of black-capped chickadees. (Thoreau could “get more out of ten minutes with a chickadee than most men could get out of a night with Cleopatra,” Clifton Fadiman once quipped.) That overflowing sense of self-satisfied contentedness rings out in every squeaky syllable of the chestnut-back’s everyday discourse; some birds are eloquent enough in prose and have less need of music.
Conclusion: the antidote of fear
Chickadees are versatile predators, PhDs in bark-gleaning and foliage-picking, along with their triple-major undergraduate honors in seed cracking, short-range flycatching, and goldfinch-style catkin disassembly. They are undeterred by cold, not subject to seasonal despair and desolation, for they have achieved not just dispassion, which is still another human response –
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
… and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves
– Walllace Stevens, “The Snow Man” – too austere for chickadees
– but an active embrace of whatever the seasons bring, which is the more natural orientation, and one which we too can emulate and aspire to:
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.
– Shelley, “Rarely, rarely, comest thou” – more fitting
Their voices express this unflattenable effervescence, are filled with a squeakiness which cheers and delights us sadly unsqueaky humans. To what does this all add up?
I’ll eat anything, anywhere
+ I fear nothing
+ I love to talk
The single most widely-loved backyard feeder bird
I prefaced my last essay, on red-tailed hawks, by underlining a common thread throughout these pages: the most satisfying birds to know are those you can get close to, can approach on convivial terms. There is no more convivial bird than the chickadee.
Birdfeeding, in anything like its modern guise, more or less started with chickadees. The pioneers of the practice included early 19th century English country gentlemen like J.F.M. Dovaston, friend of famed artist Thomas Bewick, who hung out his “ornithotrophe” laden with bones and meat scraps to attract the tits, nuthatches, and robins. The most prolific writer of popular natural history in 19th century America was William Burroughs, who nailed suet and marrow bones to tree trunks to provide for these fearless survivors of winter. And in the very Emerson poem we’ve been slowly working through, the author concludes that the proper response to the chickadee’s cheering message is a vow of future offerings:
When here again thy pilgrim comes,
He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.
Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,
Thou first and foremost shalt be fed.
People love to see chickadees and give them food because chickadees are miniscule, round, adorable, talkative, and fearless. They have all the right qualities to elicit universal human sympathy.
Young Chickadees are such cunning little creatures that the temptation to fondle them is sometimes irresistible. The parents may have very decided views as to the propriety of such action, or they may regard you as some benevolent giant, whose ways are above suspicion.
– Dawson, The Birds of California
And in return, chickadees love to be fed, taking to our apparatuses and extended hands as one more playground and dining table for them to explore. Many people are now well-intentioned towards most birds, but usually even our good intentions are met with deserved caution and hesitancy: birds fly from us. Here at last we have a rare case of mutual understanding, reciprocated benefit, of good will being met with trust.
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paean! Veni, vidi, vici.
As a species, we have become used to conquering over nature, whether we individually want to or not. In this case, we’ve planted trees and the chickadees have colonized my town, where they once were not. I buy myself a pound of peanuts, and five pounds for the chickadee feeder. It may well be that the chickadee has conquered here, but I know I have not lost.
Hand-feeding header photo by Christine Hansen
Chickadee = cheer on the wing: seeing, hearing them pure joy. Thanks for another great essay, Jack!
Love your essay! Thank you!
Thank you Chris and Lorrie!
love your writing, Jack. this bird observation hobby is getting into my bones and I’m grateful to have your viewpoint. Thanks!!