How to Attract Winter Chickadees
Help These Year-Round Residents Get Through the Colder Months
Nov 19, 2008
Winter is tough on songbirds. As snow blankets the earth and food supplies dwindle, humans can provide sustenance for feathered visitors…and a bit of entertainment for themselves on otherwise gray days. Providing the right kinds of food and vegetative cover will go a long way toward seeing birds through the lean times.
Black-capped chickadees—small passerine birds with black caps on their heads—are among birdwatchers’ favorite backyard sightings. Chickadees are usually year-round residents, but they typically range over several acres as they forage for food or seek roosting sites.
The chickadee’s distinctive three-note, whistled call is familiar to most—at least in springtime, when the chickadees are setting up housekeeping and preparing to rear young. However, as autumn melts into winter, it is uncommon to hear chickadees’ mating calls. During the short days of the year, it is typically the birds’ alarm or “feeding” call that reaches human ears: an abrupt, scratchy CHICKADEE-DEE-DEE, from which their name derives.
Where Should Bird Feeders Be Placed?
Chickadees will repeatedly fly to a feeder, grab a morsel, and then quickly return to nearby cover to eat or stash the offering. Knowledgeable birdwatchers often place several feeding stations around their property to accommodate the birds' territorial nature (it's desirable, but not essential, to be able to watch a birdfeeder from a window). Putting feeders near trees and shrubbery provides security for foraging chickadees. Annual plants that produce seeds (coneflowers, sunflowers, etc.) should be left standing; they are magnets for birds.
What Foods do Chickadees Like?
- During summertime, chickadees spend their daylight hours consuming small insects, spiders, insect larvae, pupae, and eggs, lice and other invertebrates. When food is plentiful, chickadees hoard a significant proportion of it; they have a remarkable ability to remember where they cache their food.
- During winter, chickadees consume a larger number of seeds, but they still seek out insects for their higher energy content. It is this need for calories that should prompt a birdwatcher to provide items like sunflower seeds, peanuts and suet.
- Many commercial seed mixes contain lots of millet, which chickadees find less than useful. Mixing black sunflower seeds—which contain high levels of oil—with commercial birdseed will help boost calories.
- Coarsely crushed peanuts—another high-calorie offering—can be added to a birdfeeder or scattered upon a platform. Breaking the peanuts into smaller pieces makes it easier for the chickadees to consume them.
- Suet—which is raw beef fat that is often impregnated with millet, sunflower seeds, nuts, and other nutritious items—is one of the best winter foods for chickadees (as well as a variety of other birds). Some birders make their own suet, but it can be purchased at stores that carry birdseed or pet foods. Placing the suet in a wire cage that is only open on the bottom will help chickadees—and other birds that can hang upside down while feeding—get their share of this precious commodity. Some people try to discourage squirrels and larger birds from visiting feeding stations, but these creatures, too, need help during the colder weather.
- If at all possible, maintain an open water source for birds to visit. Even when snow is on the ground, birds need water to drink.
Once a decision is made to feed birds during the winter, feeders and platforms should be kept full and free of snow. Even though chickadees are yearlong residents, they will grow to depend on the more readily available food, and their foraging patterns may change. Other birds, too (including some that would otherwise migrate southward), may linger at feeders. If their food source then runs out, they have no alternative resources.
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