28: Black-capped Chickadee
I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. I want to mention that biological classification as taught by western science has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.
I was just reading about today’s animal, the Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus*) in the Longmont Leader, when I read this: “Most of the time, they will take their food someplace other than where they got it to eat it. This is dependent on how large the piece of food is and how far it is to a hiding place. Black-capped chickadees have also been reported to feed on the fat of dead animals.” From this I learned that I have much in common with this inquisitive, non-migratory bird. They live in the northern 2/3 of the United States and much of Canada (they are the provincial bird of New Brunswick!). In Colorado, they can be found in deciduous forests and urban areas between 5000 and 9000 feet. Migratory songbirds hang out with them on their journeys and respond to the chickadee’s warning calls.
These birds are very clever, with active social lives. They hide individual seeds to be eaten later and have an incredible spatial memory – able to remember food caches across time and space. One study found that those who live in the harsher climate of Alaska have better spatial memory for finding food caches than those from the milder climate of suburban Windsor, Colorado, offering a tantalizing glimpse into how brains adapt to different environments.
During winter, they establish social hierarchies, with older individuals dominating younger, and males dominating females. This means that those lower in the hierarchy must seek less secure food sources, and as a result are more open to eating whatever food they can find. Primates exhibit a similar behavior, with those lower in the social hierarchy having varied diets because they are used to eating whatever they can get.
Black-capped chickadees have very complex vocalizations, used in order to communicate when foraging in leafy areas where they may not be able to see others. They sing “Fee-bee” when they are alone in the wild and when feeding their children in the nest. They sing the call they are named for, “chick-a-dee-dee” when they are communicating information about threats or about coordinating movement. They also make several other sounds which they learn when they are in the nest, so that children born to the same parents in different years will make similar sounds. They can also vary their sounds based on background noise, helpful when living near humans.
*Atricapillus means “black haired” in Latin. Another name for this bird is kejegigilhasis, named by the Penobscot people speaking the Abenaki language.