“The state bird shall be the chickadee.” There it is, written directly into Maine law: Title 1, Chapter 9, Section 209. It’s been our official state bird for 98 years.
The recognition is fitting. Chickadees are inherently cordial, industrious and useful. They watch out for their neighbors. They’re backyard birds, both at home and up at camp.
This designation has two drawbacks. It’s also the state bird of Massachusetts, which seems unfair since Massachusetts chose it 14 years after Maine did. We had it first, sort of.
Massachusetts was more specific, designating the black-capped chickadee as its official state bird. Maine lawmakers only designated the chickadee, ignoring the fact that we host two different chickadee species. Boreal chickadees are brown-capped residents of northern Maine.
Seven chickadee species breed in North America. At least, I hope that’s still true. The gray-headed chickadee is a circumpolar resident across the top of Europe and Asia. Alaska historically maintained a small population, but they have mostly or completely disappeared in the last decade. The last eBird report from Alaska was in 2018.
The gray-headed chickadee is called the Siberian tit in older American guidebooks, and that’s still its name across Eurasia. Chickadees have many close cousins in other parts of the world, where they are called tits instead of chickadees. I haven’t been to Europe much, but I’ve visited enough to have sighted great, blue and coal tits. Their behaviors are strikingly similar to our chickadees.
Boreal chickadees reside in dense northern spruce forests across the continent. Black-capped chickadees overlap with them in the southernmost portion of their boreal range and also breed in temperate forests southward into Maryland. There, they start to overlap with Carolina chickadees, whose range covers the entire southeastern United States.
Mountain chickadees occupy much of the American West. They overlap with chestnut-backed chickadees along the Pacific coast. A tiny population of Mexican chickadees breeds along the Arizona-Mexico border, a region no other chickadee species occupies.
At the height of the pandemic, I spent quality time with my own backyard chickadees. I realized I had been taking them for granted far too long. They are highly entertaining. I’ve never seen gray-headed chickadees, but I’ve seen all the other species, even the Mexican chickadee in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains. All of them are amusing and behave in similar ways.
Chickadees are curious. They are apt to investigate rather than avoid strange noises and movements in the woods. They are the first-alert system for other woodland critters when danger is detected. They even have an alert language — the more “dee-dee-dees” in their alarm calls, the greater the threat.
Chickadees are quick to assess danger and often decide humans aren’t very threatening. While mourning doves and blue jays scatter the moment someone steps into view, chickadees remain at the feeder going about their business. They may scold, and more than once I’ve found myself asking them, “Why are you mad at me?”
Chickadees are social, foraging together in winter. But they also maintain boundaries with each other. On pleasant days, you might hear their whistled “Hey, Sweetie,” a territorial defense song that is an early prelude to pair bonding and nesting season. Carolina chickadees have a similar four-note song. Curiously, boreal chickadees lack a song but offer a short “chortle” defining their territories.
Boreal chickadees are more reserved than their black-capped cousins. They are much less likely to scold people. In fact, I can only recall getting a tongue-lashing one time. It made such an impression I remember the exact spot — on an ATV trail on the backside of #4 Mountain, east of Moosehead Lake. Clearly, their chicks had just left the nest and they were none too pleased to have me around.
Boreal chickadees visit feeders in Canada and Alaska but rarely in Maine. Similar to other northern-breeding species, they are skilled at caching food for the winter. That may prove to be their undoing. Boreal chickadees have disappeared from the Maine coast in a startlingly short time, possibly because winter warm-ups are harming their secret stashes. Some ornithologists speculate that this is also one reason gray-headed chickadees have disappeared from northern Alaska.
Chickadees get only about 20% of their food from feeders. The rest of the time, they’re foraging around the neighborhood. I can hear them coming and going. When they’re ready to dine at my feeder, they sweep in abruptly together. It’s fun to watch.
Or maybe I’m just easily entertained.