Black Capped Chickadee

Common Backyard Birds

BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE
(Parus atricapillus) Titmouse family
AKA: BLACK-CAPPED TITMOUSE; BLACK-CAP TIT

Length about 5 inches. Resident in most of North America.

Because of its delightful notes, flitting ways, and fearlessness, the black capped chickadee is one of our best-known backyard birds.

The chickadee responds to human encouragement, and by hanging a constant supply of suet, this black-capped visitor can be made a regular feeder in suburban gardens or city yards. Though small in size, these cousins of the titmice are highly useful against insects, gleaned mostly from the twigs and branches of trees. The chickadee’s food is made up of insects and seeds, largely seeds of pines, with a few of the poison ivy, some weeds, and sunflowers.

No "fair weather friend" is the jolly little chickadee. In the depth of the autumn equinoctial storm the Black-Capped Chickadee returns to the tops of the trees close by the house, where, through the sunshine, snow, and tempest of the entire winter, you may hear its cheery, irrepressible chickadee-dee-dee-dee or day-day-day as it swings Around the dangling cones of the evergreens. It fairly overflows with good spirits, and is never more contagiously gay than in a snowstorm.

So active, so friendly and cheering, what would the long northern winters be like without this lovable little neighbor?

Black-capped Chickadees serve a more utilitarian purpose, however, than bracing faint-hearted spirits. "There is no bird that compares with it in destroying the female canker-worm moths and their eggs," writes a well-known entomologist.

He calculates that as a chickadee destroys about 5,500 eggs in one day, it will eat 138,750 eggs in the twenty-five days it takes the canker-worm moth to crawl up the trees. The moral that it pays to attract Black-Capped Chickadees about your home by feeding them in winter is obvious. Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, in her delightful and helpful book Birdcraft, tells us how she makes a sort of a bird-hash of finely minced raw meat, waste canary-seed, buckwheat, and cracked oats, which she scatters in a sheltered spot for all the winter birds. The way this is consumed leaves no doubt of its popularity. A raw bone, hung from an evergreen limb, is equally appreciated.

Friendly as the chickadee is and Dr. Abbott declares it the tamest bird we have, it prefers well-timbered districts, especially where there are red-bud trees, at nesting season. It is very often clever enough to leave the labor of hollowing out a nest in the tree-trunk to the woodpecker or nuthatch - whose old homes it readily appropriates - or, when these birds object, a knot-hole or a hollow fence-rail answers every purpose. Here, in the summer woods, when family cares beset it, a plaintive, minor whistle replaces the chickadee-dee-dee that Thoreau likens to "silver tinkling" as he heard it on a frosty morning.

"Piped a tiny voice near by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry
Chick-chickadeedee! 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.

In Stock!
Bird Supply store:

Bird Baths
Solar Bird Baths
Bird Bath Fountains

Bird Feeders
Finch Feeder
Glass Nectar Feeders

Attract Wild Birds - CONTACT - 613.332.5766

www.AttractWildBirds.com