Black-Capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus): Facts and Calls

What does a black-capped chickadee look like?

The chickadee is a round, big-headed little bird with a short, thin black bill. Its jet-black cap and bib frame bright white cheeks. The back is soft gray, sometimes with a greenish tinge, the wings and tail are slate gray, and the wing feathers have conspicuous white edges. The underparts are white with warm buff flanks, which are richest in fall.

Males and females look alike, although males tend to have a slightly larger bib. Young birds resemble adults but have fluffier plumage. Nine subspecies are recognized, differing slightly in size and color; birds of the Pacific Northwest are the smallest and darkest, those of southern Alaska the palest.

Several close relatives look similar. The Carolina chickadee of the southeastern United States is almost identical and best told by its four-note song. The mountain chickadee of the West has a white eyebrow, and the boreal chickadee of the far north has a brown cap. In Europe and Asia, the closest look-alike is the willow tit, once thought to be the same species.

How big is a chickadee?

Black-capped chickadees are among the smallest birds at most North American bird feeders, about as long as an American goldfinch but lighter than a house sparrow.

Their flight is light and slightly bouncy, with rapid wingbeats. Chickadees usually make short hops between trees of less than 15 m (50 ft), at around 20 km/h (12 mph), and avoid crossing large open spaces.

Habitat and range

Black-capped chickadees live in deciduous and mixed woodland, forest edges, willow and alder thickets, orchards, parks and leafy suburbs. They are at home anywhere with trees for feeding and soft, dead wood for nesting.

The range covers most of Alaska and Canada, from Yukon and British Columbia to Newfoundland, and the northern half of the United States, south to northern California, New Mexico, Missouri and New Jersey. The species also lives at higher elevations in the Appalachian Mountains. It is absent from Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, where the chestnut-backed chickadee replaces it.

Chickadees do not migrate. Each bird spends its life within a few square kilometers, and in some years, when northern seed crops fail, extra birds wander short distances south.

What do chickadees eat?

Black-capped chickadees are omnivores. In spring and summer, insects and spiders make up most of their diet, especially caterpillars, which are vital food for chicks. The birds hop along twigs, hang upside down to search the undersides of leaves and probe bark crevices for insect eggs and pupae.

In fall and winter, seeds and berries become more important, along with hibernating insects and their eggs. At bird feeders, chickadees take one sunflower seed at a time, fly to a branch, hold the seed with their feet and hammer it open with the bill.

Food caching and memory

Chickadees are champion hoarders. In fall they hide seeds and insects one by one in bark crevices, under lichen, in clusters of conifer needles and in knotholes, a habit known as scatter hoarding. A single bird can store thousands of items in a season and remember where many of them are for several weeks.

This feat of memory has made chickadees important in brain research. The hippocampus, the part of the brain used for spatial memory, is larger in chickadees than in non-caching birds, and in the 1990s researchers found that new neurons are added to the chickadee hippocampus most actively in fall, when caching peaks. Chickadees from harsh climates, such as Alaska, have larger hippocampi and perform better in memory tests than birds from milder regions. More on this in how do chickadees survive winter?

Calls, song and behavior

The chickadee’s best-known sound is its namesake “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” call, used by both sexes all year to keep in touch with the flock and to warn of predators. Research has shown that chickadees add more “dee” notes when the danger is greater, and other birds understand the message. The full story is in why do chickadees say chickadee?

The song is quite different: a clear, sweet whistle of two notes, “fee-bee”, with the second note lower, heard mostly from males in late winter and spring. Many birdwatchers can coax a reply from a resident male simply by whistling these two notes. Chickadees have more than a dozen distinct calls in total, including a high “seet” for flying hawks and a harsh “gargle” used in disputes.

In fall and winter, chickadees form small flocks with a strict pecking order, in which older birds and males dominate. These flocks are the core of mixed foraging groups that also include nuthatches, titmice, downy woodpeckers, kinglets and brown creepers, all of which benefit from the chickadees’ alertness.

Nesting and life cycle

Pairs form in fall and winter, and in spring the flocks break up into breeding territories. Chickadees nest in tree cavities 1–7 m (3–23 ft) above the ground. The pair either excavates a new hole in soft, rotting wood, uses a natural cavity or old woodpecker hole, or moves into a nest box.

The female builds the nest inside the cavity, a base of moss and bark strips topped with a soft lining of animal hair. She lays usually six to eight white eggs finely dotted with reddish brown, and incubates them alone for 11–14 days while the male brings her food. If disturbed, a sitting female may give an explosive hiss that sounds like a snake.

Both parents feed the chicks, which leave the nest 12–16 days after hatching and are fed for a few more weeks. Chickadees usually raise one brood a year and can breed at one year old.

Surviving northern winters

Black-capped chickadees stay through winters in which night temperatures fall below -30 °C (-22 °F) in parts of Canada and Alaska. For a bird weighing about as much as two quarters, this is a huge challenge, because small bodies lose heat quickly.

Chickadees meet it with a combination of tricks. Their winter plumage is dense, and on cold days they fluff their feathers to trap a thick layer of warm air. They shiver constantly to produce heat, and they spend almost every daylight hour feeding, building up a layer of fat that is largely burned off overnight. At night they roost alone in tree holes or thick conifers and let their body temperature drop by as much as 10–12 °C (18–22 °F) below its normal daytime level of about 42 °C (108 °F), a state called regulated hypothermia that saves a great deal of energy.

Their hidden food stores are their insurance against storms and deep snow, when fresh food is hard to find. In very cold regions, studies have found that chickadees with access to bird feeders survive harsh winters better than birds without them, although in milder areas feeders mainly change where the birds forage. Even birds that visit feeders every day still get most of their food from natural sources such as seeds, hidden caches and dormant insects, so feeders supplement rather than replace wild food.

Lifespan, predators and threats

Most black-capped chickadees live about two to three years, and many young birds die in their first winter. Survivors can live much longer: the oldest known wild bird reached about 12 years.

Adults are taken by small hawks such as sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, small owls including the northern pygmy-owl and eastern screech-owl, and northern shrikes. Raccoons, squirrels, snakes and house wrens raid nests. Human-related dangers include window collisions, pesticides and outdoor cats. Since the late 1990s, a beak deformity called avian keratin disorder, which causes overgrown, curved bills, has been found in many chickadees in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the black-capped chickadee as Least Concern, and its population is increasing. The total population is estimated at roughly 40 million or more birds. Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey data show stable or rising numbers across much of the range, helped by the bird’s ability to live in suburbs and parks.

Chickadees and people

Few birds are as familiar or as popular in northern North America. The black-capped chickadee is the state bird of Maine and Massachusetts, the provincial bird of New Brunswick and, since 2022, the official bird of Calgary, Alberta. Find out more about official birds in our list of US state birds.

Chickadees are often the first birds to find a new feeder, and in some parks they will even land on a person’s hand to take a seed. Their cheerful calls on the coldest winter days, when most other songbirds have left, have made them a symbol of toughness and good spirits.