Chickadees Weather January The chickadee surely must rank near the top of America's favorite songbirds. Even though the weather has been unusually mild and the ground disgustingly free of snow, January usually is the month that’s bound to have the coldest day of the year. I have fond memories of one of my all-time favorite college professors, Prof. Lavelva Bradbury, outstanding teacher of physical geography. Invariably her Monday morning class began with a memorable monologue often in regards to an unusual experience she recently had with the land or weather. One of her talks dealt with temperature records she had maintained for many years, and she warned us to dress warmly because we could expect the coldest time of the year to occur around the third week of January. You wonder how small birds, such as black-capped chickadees, survive these below-zero nights. The winter metabolism of a chickadee is said to resemble a "raging inferno." You don’t feel a distinct heartbeat when you hold one, as you can with a blue jay for example, but rather you sense that something inside of it is buzzing or humming. I’ve handled hundreds of them through banding procedures and have come to sense this unusual phenomenon quite well. A chickadee’s heartbeat speeds up as the surrounding air temperature decreases. An active feeding chickadee on a sub-zero day could be expected to have a heartbeat of over 1000 per minute. The heart would slow down to about 500 beats when the bird is asleep. What amazed me was to learn that there is on record (as proven through bird banding) a chickadee that lived in the wild to be at least 12 years and five months old! It was still very alive when it was released for the last time and the bander didn’t know how old it lived to be. What a powerful heart for such a tiny creature! This one-third ounce "speed merchant," the chickadee, has a quick get-away clocked at three-hundredths of one second. Actually their overall flight is quite slow – short undulating spurts. But keep in mind the bird’s tiny size and the fact that fast flight over long distances is not needed in its lifestyle. Acrobatic quickness and inquisitiveness, yes. Prolonged speed, no. Have you noticed a build-up in numbers of chickadees at your feeders during the past several weeks? Depending upon severity of weather and the food-finding conditions to the north, we can usually expect a southerly movement of black-capped chickadees into this region during the latter part of November and into December. Large irruptions of this nature are the exception, however. It was during a two-day weekend of late January, 1969, that I captured a total of 53 chickadees in my traps for banding near the feeders in the backyard of the Ridges Rangelight Residence at Baileys Harbor where I was living at the time. Thirty-nine were unbanded and fourteen had already been banded by myself in previous months, dating back to April 1, 1967. Little wonder that the feeders were going empty with regularity from day to day with all those hungry chickadees around, along with the other bird species. One year we kept track of the sunflower seeds we bought and fed to the birds and it amounted to 44 fifty-pound bags! That’s over one ton! The huge wintering flock of evening grosbeaks that year, as many as 300 on some days, was largely responsible for the high bird-food bill. It’s been said that very few wild animals, including birds, live long enough to die a natural death. The great majority of them are killed and devoured by their natural enemies. Diseased birds, ones with foot pox and slow in taking off, or crippled birds are most often the ones that fall victim to their predators. This natural phenomenon not only helps to keep animal populations in reasonably proper balance, but also tends to insure strong, healthy breeding stock of all animal species. We never tire of watching and enjoying the chickadees that feast primarily on the black oil sunflower seeds and the marvel meal, a peanut butter mixture, at our place. However, it’s in the wild woods, well away from humans and bird feeders, that we especially like to observe these black and white, beady-eyed bundles of nervous energy. To say the least, a chickadee has very strong feet and claws and a short, rather pointed, extremely authoritative bill. Observe one’s feeding habits and you will soon learn that it spends much of its time in an upside-down position searching the undersides of twigs and branches for especially insect eggs, such as those of tent caterpillars, wood-boring beetles, and cankerworms. It has been estimated that one chickadee can consume 100,000 cankerworm eggs in 25 days. Hopefully this later January their soft, rather loose and fluffy plumage will keep these black-capped favorites warm when, during one day at the extreme, they will be active for about nine hours and asleep for 15. What a feat on a 25 degrees below zero F. night! Keep that in mind this month when you either turn up the thermostat or add another chunk of hardwood to the fire. Three cheers for the chickadee, personification of cheerfulness, the trusting favorite of nearly everyone in North America! This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 01/08/2004. © Copyright 2004 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.