Bird of the Month: Chickadee
Black-capped Chickadee or Carolina Chickadee? It’s difficult to tell. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
Champaign-Urbana hosts several pairs of year-round bird species that can be difficult for beginning birders to tell apart. Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers have the same black and white color patterns. Male Cooper’s Hawks and female Sharp-shinned Hawks also have similar plumage and are roughly the same size. Over time and with the help of bird guides or apps and more experienced birders, one learns to tell them apart, most of the time.
One pair of year-round species in our area that are nearly impossible to distinguish is our January bird of the month—the Black-capped and Carolina Chickadee. This is partly because they have the same color patterns—black cap and chin, white face, gray back—and are roughly the same size. While they sing different songs—the black-capped a two-pitched fee-bee, the Carolina fee-bee-bay or as many as five syllables—and live in different parts of North America—the Carolina in the South, the black-capped in the northern U.S. and most of Canada, that doesn’t help us to tell them apart in our area. We live in a transition zone where the two species overlap. Why does that matter? They sing different songs, don’t they? Not always…not in the transition zone.
Local birders face two problems when they see or hear a chickadee. One is that the bird may have learned the wrong song. Chickadees, like many birds, learn to sing from hearing the song of their species. However a Black-capped Chickadee in our area may learn the song of a Carolina Chickadee or vice versa. Or, even more confusing for birders, the bird may learn the songs of both species. To complicate matters even further, Carolina and Black-capped Chickadees in the transition zone may mate with each other instead of their own species, producing hybrids that may sing the wrong song, both songs, or a song which isn’t quite either one. Having heard the same bird perched in a tree in my own yard sing both songs within a few minutes, I’ve learned to simply mark down “chickadee” rather than try to identify the species.
Chickadees are relatively small birds, smaller than many sparrows. They eat insects, spiders, and other small prey in the spring, summer, and fall, but add seeds to their diet in the winter.
Where can you find chickadees? They frequent forests, open woodlands, parks, and residential neighborhoods with trees…and bird feeders. As I write this, I’m watching a pair of chickadees taking turns on one of my black oil sunflower feeders. Cornell Lab’s All About Birds notes that they also eat peanuts, suet, peanut butter, and mealworms. If you’re just getting started on bird feeding, it may take a while to attract chickadees, and then again, it may not. You are more likely to see chickadees if there are a lot of trees in your neighborhood.
How are chickadees doing? Partners in Flight, a partnership of public and private groups dedicated to protecting bird populations, estimates there are 43 million Black-capped Chickadees, and North American Breeding Bird Surveys show their population has increased slightly over the past half century. There are an estimated 13 million Carolina Chickadees and, their population has decreased 16% during the same period.