Black-capped Chickadee

The combination of black cap and bib with bright white cheeks is distinctive; the back, wings and tail are gray and the underparts whitish with buff flanks ¹. Chickadees are active, acrobatic and social, living in flocks that often include woodpeckers, nuthatches, warblers, vireos and other small woodland birds, and they seldom perch within a few feet of each other while eating ².

The calls are complex: the familiar chickadee-dee-dee carries information about flock identity and threats, and the more dee notes in the call, the higher the threat level ¹. Because migrating songbirds join chickadee flocks, listening for chickadees in spring and fall is a reliable way to find other species ¹.

Two facts explain why chickadees are such good winter birds. They hide seeds and other food items to eat later, each in a different spot, and can remember thousands of hiding places; and even when temperatures are far below zero they sleep alone in their own individual cavities, which they can excavate themselves in rotten wood ¹. The oldest known wild black-capped chickadee was at least 11 years, 8 months old ¹.

Black-capped chickadees are found in deciduous and mixed forests, open woods, parks, willow thickets, cottonwood groves and disturbed areas ². In the nine states with eBird data on this site they are among the most-reported birds in Michigan, Colorado, Oregon and Rhode Island, and essentially unrecorded in Florida, Texas and Arizona, where other chickadee species take their place ³.

In winter about half the diet is seeds, berries and other plant matter and half animal food — insects, spiders, suet and occasionally fat from carcasses; in spring, summer and fall, insects, spiders and other animal food make up 80–90 percent of what they eat ². At feeders they take mostly sunflower seeds, peanuts, suet, peanut butter and mealworms, pecking a hole in a seed's shell and chipping out tiny bits ².

Chickadees are one of the easiest birds to attract to feeders with suet, sunflower and peanuts; they do not mind tiny hanging feeders that swing in the wind and readily use window feeders ¹.

Chickadees nest in nest boxes, small natural cavities or abandoned Downy Woodpecker holes, and often excavate their own cavity in dead snags or rotten branches, frequently alder or birch; nests are usually 1.5–7 m up ². Both sexes excavate and the female builds a cup of moss lined with softer material such as rabbit fur ².

Clutches run from 1 to 13 eggs, white with fine reddish-brown dots, incubated 12–13 days; the young leave the nest after 12–16 days, and there is one brood a year ². To host a pair, put up a box well before the breeding season, add a predator guard, and fill it with sawdust or wood shavings — chickadees are especially attracted to a box they can excavate; placing it at least 60 feet into woodland keeps House Wrens from taking it over ¹.

Black-capped chickadees are common, and overall populations increased slightly between 1966 and 2019 according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey; Partners in Flight estimates the global breeding population at 43 million and rates the species 7 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, a species of low conservation concern that also benefits from people who keep feeders ².

Across the nine states with eBird occurrence data on this site (records from 2020–2024), the Black-capped Chickadee is reported most often in Michigan, where it ranks #3 among all species with 630,864 records. It is rare or absent in California, Tennessee, Arizona, Florida, Texas.

1. All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) — Black-capped Chickadee: Overview
2. All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) — Black-capped Chickadee: Life History
3. EOD – eBird Observation Dataset, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0); state records 2020–2024