Attracting Birds
How to Attract Chickadees
No other North American feeder bird arrives as fast or asks for as little. If a new feeding station is going to work at all, a chickadee is the bird that tells you first.
The short answer
- Black oil sunflower in a small tube feeder hung within 12 feet (3.5 m) of a shrub or tree is the whole recipe. Chickadees usually find it in one to seven days.
- They grab a single seed and carry it to a branch to eat, so a nearby perch matters as much as the feeder.
- Chickadees cache food constantly in fall. A feeder emptying fast in October does not mean you have more birds.
- Attract chickadees and you generally get titmice, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers too, because they travel in the same winter flocks.
- A nest box with a 1 1/8 inch (29 mm) hole, packed with wood shavings, is the cheapest way to hold a pair through the breeding season.
A chickadee will usually find a new feeder within a week, sometimes within an hour, and it asks for exactly two things: black oil sunflower seed and a branch within a short flight of the feeder. That is the whole method. Everything below is refinement.
The Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) covers the northern half of the country, the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) takes the Southeast, and the Mountain Chickadee (Poecile gambeli) holds the interior West. All three behave the same way at a feeder, so the plan does not change with your zip code.
This page covers the seed and feeder combinations in order of speed, how close the cover has to be, why your seed disappears faster in October, and what a realistic first two weeks looks like.
Why chickadees are the easy win#
Chickadees are bold about objects and cautious about predators, which is an unusual and very convenient combination. A new feeder is a curiosity to be investigated, not a threat to be avoided, so they inspect it long before a cardinal or a jay will risk it.
They also live in stable winter flocks that patrol the same home range every day, checking the same trees in roughly the same order. A feeder inside that circuit gets found on the next pass. A feeder just outside it may take weeks, which is why one neighbor's yard fills with chickadees while the yard three doors down stays empty.
Their small size helps too. A chickadee takes a single seed and leaves, so it never needs a large feeder, a wide perch or a stable landing surface. The cheapest small tube feeder in the store is genuinely enough.
Which chickadee you have#
| Species | Where | Field mark |
|---|---|---|
| Black-capped Chickadee | Northern US and most of Canada | Ragged white edging in the folded wing, buffy flanks |
| Carolina Chickadee | Southeast, north to New Jersey, west to Kansas | Cleaner gray wing, neater bib edge, faster song |
| Mountain Chickadee | Rockies and interior West, mostly conifers | White eyebrow stripe through the black cap |
| Chestnut-backed Chickadee | Pacific coast strip, coastal conifer forest | Rich chestnut back and flanks |
| Boreal Chickadee | Northern conifer forest, into far northern states | Brown cap, brown flanks |
Where black-capped and Carolina ranges meet there is a narrow hybrid band running from New Jersey southwest toward Kansas. Birds in that band sing intermediate songs and are often not safely identifiable. If you live there, feed them and stop worrying about it.
Food and feeder combinations, ranked#
| Food | Feeder | Typical time to first visit | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black oil sunflower | Small tube | 1 to 7 days | The default. Nothing beats it |
| Sunflower hearts | Tube or window feeder | 1 to 7 days | Same appeal, no hull mess, spoils faster |
| Peanut pieces | Mesh peanut feeder | 1 to 3 weeks | Excellent in cold weather |
| Suet | Cage or upside-down suet feeder | 1 to 3 weeks | Strong winter draw, shared with woodpeckers |
| Safflower | Any | 2 to 4 weeks | Chickadees take it; squirrels mostly do not |
| Nyjer | Nyjer feeder | Often never | Chickadees largely ignore it |
| Cheap mixes with milo | Any | No | Raked out and left to rot |
Two things follow from that table. First, you do not need a specialty feeder: a plain tube feeder with short perches is ideal, because it excludes the heavy birds that would otherwise monopolize it. Second, adding a second food type buys you less than moving the feeder closer to cover.
Cover within twelve feet#
This is the placement rule that matters most for chickadees, and it comes straight from how they eat. The bird lands, takes one seed, and needs somewhere to sit and hammer it open. If the nearest perch is 40 feet (12 m) away, every seed costs an exposed round trip across open ground.
Hang the feeder 8 to 12 feet (2.5 to 3.5 m) from a shrub, hedge or tree branch. Closer than about 5 feet (1.5 m) gives a cat a launch point. Farther than about 20 feet (6 m) and visits get shorter and less frequent, especially when a hawk is working the neighborhood. The full set of tradeoffs is in where to hang a bird feeder.
If your yard is genuinely bare, a brush pile built from prunings gives you usable cover in an afternoon and costs nothing.
Give them a staging branch
A single dead branch or a bamboo stake pushed into the ground 6 feet (1.8 m) from the feeder works as a staging perch. Chickadees queue on it, take a seed, and return. It also lets you watch them at eye level instead of straight on at the port.
Why your seed vanishes in October#
Chickadees are scatter-hoarders. Through fall they carry seeds away one at a time and wedge them into bark crevices, under lichen, and in curled leaves, then retrieve them over the following weeks. A single bird may hide hundreds of items a day.
The practical consequence is that a fall feeder can empty at a rate that suggests a large flock when it is really four birds working hard. Do not scale up your feeder in response. Keep buying seed in quantities you use within a month and store it sealed and cool, because a bigger feeder standing half full for six weeks is how you end up with stale seed in January.
Feed for the flock, not the rate
Chickadee caching makes fall consumption a poor guide to how many birds you have. Judge your feeder size by how many birds you see at once, not by how fast the tube drains.
The birds that arrive with them#
Chickadees form the core of mixed winter foraging flocks. Titmice, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, kinglets and brown creepers all follow chickadee flocks through the woods, partly because chickadees are excellent sentinels: their alarm calls are reliable, and other species listen to them.
That has a practical upside. Getting chickadees on your feeder is often the first step to getting a white-breasted nuthatch and a tufted titmouse as well, without changing anything else. If you are building a station from scratch, start with the chickadee food and let the flock bring the rest.
Window feeders and hand feeding#
Chickadees are the species most likely to accept a feeder stuck to your glass, and the species most people manage to hand feed. Both work for the same reason: they habituate to a motionless human quickly.
A window feeder stocked with sunflower hearts will usually be in use within a week or two of going up. Hand feeding takes longer, generally several weeks of standing in the same spot at the same time with an open palm, and it works best in late winter when natural food is scarce. It is a party trick, not a conservation act, but it does no harm.
Nest boxes hold them all year#
Chickadees are cavity nesters that excavate their own holes in soft, rotting wood. They will use a nest box, and they are more likely to use one that gives them something to dig.
Build or buy a box with a 1 1/8 inch (29 mm) entrance hole, an interior floor around 4 by 4 inches (10 by 10 cm), and roughly 8 inches (20 cm) of depth below the hole. Fill it most of the way with coarse wood shavings so the pair can excavate and toss out material, which is a real part of their nesting sequence. Mount it 5 to 15 feet (1.5 to 4.5 m) up, ideally with some tree cover nearby rather than in the middle of a lawn. Sizing details for other species are in nest boxes.
A 1 1/8 inch hole also excludes House Sparrows and starlings, which is half the value.
Your first two weeks, day by day#
- Day 1. Hang a small tube of black oil sunflower 8 to 12 feet (2.5 to 3.5 m) from cover, 5 feet (1.5 m) up. Scatter a few seeds on the feeder tray and on a nearby branch so the shape reads as food from a distance.
- Days 2 to 7. Expect the first visit. It will be brief and nervous. Do not move the feeder, do not add a second one, and resist the urge to change the seed.
- Days 7 to 14. Visits become regular and the flock arrives in loose waves every 20 to 40 minutes. This is when to add a suet cage if you want woodpeckers.
- After two weeks with nothing. Check the seed is fresh, move the feeder closer to cover, and look for cats. Then be honest about whether chickadees live within a few hundred yards of you at all. In winter feeding terms, they are common but not universal, and there is no seed that conjures a bird from an area it does not occupy.
Frequently asked questions#
What is the best food to attract chickadees?
Black oil sunflower seed. The shell is thin enough for a small bill to open, the kernel is high in fat, and chickadees will take it before almost anything else. Sunflower hearts work equally well and leave no hull mess. Peanut pieces and suet are strong second choices, especially in cold weather.
How long does it take chickadees to find a new feeder?
Often one to seven days where chickadees already live nearby, which is faster than any other common feeder bird. They are naturally curious and investigate new objects in their home range within hours. If two weeks pass with nothing, the problem is usually distance from cover or the fact that no chickadee flock uses your block.
Will chickadees use a window feeder?
Yes, more readily than most species. Chickadees tolerate a person sitting a few feet away behind glass, and a window feeder stocked with sunflower hearts is one of the reliable ways to watch them at close range. Give them a week to accept the new shape, and keep a shrub or small tree in reach of the window.
Do chickadees come to feeders in summer?
They do, but visits drop off sharply from May through July because they are catching caterpillars and other insects for their young. Nestling chickadees are fed almost entirely on insects, not seed. Traffic picks up again in August as families begin moving through together.
Why does a chickadee take one seed and fly away?
That is how they eat. A chickadee cannot crack a sunflower seed while perched at a feeder port, so it carries the seed to a branch, pins it under its feet and hammers it open. In fall it also caches many of those seeds in bark crevices instead of eating them.