Bird Profile

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

The chickadee of wet coastal conifer forest, dressed in chestnut instead of gray, with a call so hoarse and fast it sounds like a chickadee with a cold.

The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the smallest and most richly colored of the North American chickadees, and the easiest to identify if you can see the back. Cap and throat are dark, the cheeks are white, and the entire back and rump are a warm chestnut brown that no other chickadee has. At about 4 inches (11 cm) and a third of an ounce (10 g), it is a very small bird even by chickadee standards.

It is tied to damp coniferous forest: Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, redwood, and the planted Monterey pines and cypresses of coastal towns. Where those trees grow along the Pacific slope, this is usually the default chickadee, and in much of coastal Oregon, Washington and northern California it outnumbers the Black-capped Chickadee in suburban yards.

This profile covers the marks that separate it from the other western chickadees, what it eats and how it uses a feeder, the caching habit that explains where all your sunflower goes, and the nest box specification that actually works for a bird this small.

How to identify a Chestnut-backed Chickadee#

The chestnut back is the mark. It runs from the nape down over the shoulders to the rump, and in decent light it is obvious. The cap is dark sooty brown rather than the clean black of a Black-capped Chickadee, though in shade the difference is easy to miss. The throat patch is genuinely black, the cheeks and sides of the neck are white, and the wings and tail are plain gray.

Flank color varies geographically. Across most of the range, from Alaska through Oregon and into northwestern California, the flanks are chestnut like the back. In the central California coastal population, roughly from the San Francisco Bay Area south, the flanks are gray and only the back is chestnut. Both are the same species, and the gray-flanked birds catch people out.

The voice is a useful second confirmation. The chick-a-dee call is faster, hoarser and higher pitched than a Black-capped Chickadee's, often shortened to a scratchy tsik-a-dee-dee. More usefully, this species has no clear whistled song. If you hear the pure two-note fee-bee whistle, you are hearing a Black-capped or Mountain Chickadee, not this one.

Confusion species

In practice, the split you will use daily is Chestnut-backed versus Black-capped in the Pacific Northwest, where both are common in the same yards. Look at the back, not the cap, and listen for the whistle you will not hear from this species. The Mountain Chickadee barely overlaps except in a few interior areas.

Where and when you will see them#

The main range is a coastal strip running from south-central and southeastern Alaska through coastal British Columbia, western Washington and Oregon, and down through the California coast ranges to roughly Santa Barbara County. A separate interior population occupies the wet forests of northern Idaho, western Montana and the interior of British Columbia.

They are non-migratory. The birds in your yard in January are the same ones that nested nearby in May, and they hold territories as pairs during breeding and join wandering mixed flocks the rest of the year. What changes seasonally is visibility: from October through March they are conspicuous at feeders, and in June they are quiet and busy in the canopy.

One notable range detail is that this species has expanded. Over the twentieth century it colonized urban and suburban areas around San Francisco Bay and extended south along the coast, apparently following the maturing of planted conifers in cities and gardens. If your neighborhood has forty-year-old Monterey pines, it may have chickadees that were not there when the trees went in.

What Chestnut-backed Chickadees eat#

The natural diet is heavily invertebrate: caterpillars, beetles, wasps, aphids, scale insects and spiders, gleaned from conifer needles, twigs and bark, often while hanging upside down at the tip of a branch. Studies of chickadee diets consistently find a higher proportion of animal food in this species than in some of its relatives, and conifer seeds and small fruits fill in the rest.

At a feeder the preferences are simple and stable through the year.

If you buy one thing for chickadees, buy sunflower hearts. If you buy two, add suet. Whole black oil sunflower works perfectly well and costs less, at the price of hull litter under the feeder.

The feeder setup Chestnut-backed Chickadees actually use#

Chickadees do not linger. The pattern is always the same: land, take one seed, leave, open or cache it elsewhere, come back. That behavior shapes the setup.

• A tube feeder with sunflower hearts is the standard. Small perches suit them and larger birds struggle, so they get more turns.
• A suet feeder with a cage or a tail-prop design, hung against a trunk or from a branch.
• A peanut feeder with chopped nuts is a strong third option in winter.
• Because they take one seed at a time, a small feeder refilled often beats a huge one. There is no need for capacity here.
• Site the feeder within a few feet of a conifer or dense shrub. Chickadees work between cover and feeder in short hops and are reluctant to cross open lawn.

Behavior worth knowing#

Caching is constant. Chestnut-backed Chickadees carry seeds away and wedge them into bark crevices, needle clusters, moss and lichen, retrieving them later. This is why a small feeder can empty in a morning with only a handful of birds visiting: most of that seed is now stored across half an acre of forest.

Outside the breeding season they travel in mixed-species flocks, and joining one of these flocks is the fastest way to find every small bird in a patch of woods. Typical companions are Bushtits, kinglets, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Brown Creepers, Pygmy Nuthatches where the ranges meet, and warblers.

Like other chickadees they use their calls to convey information about threats, and a burst of agitated calling usually means a predator is visible. If your feeder empties of birds and the chickadees are scolding from cover, look for a cat, an accipiter or an owl before you assume the seed has gone stale.

They are also tame. Chestnut-backed Chickadees will often continue feeding a few feet away while you fill a feeder, and they investigate people who stand still. That is charming and it also means they are unusually exposed to outdoor cats, which is the single largest avoidable killer of small yard birds; see cats and birds.

Nesting and nest boxes#

Chestnut-backed Chickadees are cavity nesters. They excavate their own holes in soft, rotting wood where they can, and otherwise use old woodpecker holes, natural cavities and nest boxes. The cavity is usually low to moderate, often within 20 feet (6 m) of the ground.

The nest is built by the female from moss, bark strips and plant fiber, and lined very heavily with mammal hair and fur, often to the point that the cup looks like felt. When she leaves the nest during laying and incubation she pulls a plug of that fur over the eggs to hide them. Clutches are commonly 5 to 9 white eggs with fine reddish spotting.

Incubation runs roughly two weeks and the young leave the nest around eighteen to twenty-one days after hatching, longer than most open-cup songbirds because a cavity is a safer place to grow. Both parents feed the brood, almost entirely on caterpillars and other invertebrates.

Population and conservation#

Chestnut-backed Chickadees are common across their range and carry no conservation designation. Continental trend data suggest a broadly stable population, and the twentieth-century expansion into California suburbs shows the species can gain ground where suitable trees are planted.

The pressures that matter are structural rather than dramatic. Cavity nesters need dead and dying wood, and tidy management that removes every snag and rotten limb takes away nesting sites faster than boxes replace them. Intensive short-rotation logging of coastal conifer forest reduces both the old wood and the insect-rich canopy they forage in. If you own trees, leaving a standing dead limb where it is safe to do so is a genuine contribution; see snags and dead wood.

In a yard, the specific risks are outdoor cats, window collisions, and feeder hygiene. Chickadees crowd onto shared perches with finches and are susceptible to the same feeder-borne diseases, so keep to the routine in how often to clean a feeder.

A Chestnut-backed Chickadee setup that works#

• A small tube feeder of sunflower hearts, refilled often rather than a large one filled occasionally.
• A suet cage nearby, kept stocked through the wet winter months.
• Chopped peanuts as a third option, unsalted and never in the shell.
• Feeders within a few feet of a conifer or dense shrub, so birds never cross open ground.
• A nest box with a 1 1/8 inch (2.9 cm) hole, no perch, mounted by late winter.
• Any safe standing dead wood left in place, because natural cavities beat boxes.