Bird Profile

Mountain Chickadee

The chickadee of western conifer forest, and the only one with a white stripe above the eye. In fall it drops downslope, which is why a yard that has never had one suddenly has six.

The Mountain Chickadee (Poecile gambeli) is a small gray chickadee of western conifer forest, about 5 inches (13 cm) long, and the only chickadee in North America with a white stripe above the eye. That stripe splits the black cap into two bands and gives the bird a striped, slightly stern face.

Everything else about it is familiar: the black bib, the pale cheek, the round body, the constant movement through branch tips, and the willingness to take a sunflower seed from a feeder while you stand three feet away.

This profile covers the eyebrow and the other marks that separate it from a Black-capped Chickadee, where it lives through the year, the downslope movement that puts it in lowland yards each fall, what it eats, and how to give it a nest box it will use.

How to identify a Mountain Chickadee#

Look above the eye. A clean white supercilium runs from the bill back over the eye, cutting the black cap so the bird appears to have a black cap, a white brow, a black eyeline and a white cheek stacked in bands. It is visible at feeder range without binoculars.

The rest of the bird is cool gray. The back, wings and tail are plain gray with little or no greenish or brown tone, and the flanks are gray to very pale buff rather than the warm cinnamon of a Black-capped Chickadee. The black bib is neat and fairly small.

One caution: by late summer, worn adults can have a reduced or dingy eyebrow, and freshly fledged young show it faintly. In those cases fall back on flank color, voice and habitat.

Confusion species#

Where Mountain Chickadees live#

The range runs down the mountains of the West: interior British Columbia and Alberta south through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, the Great Basin ranges, the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies to New Mexico, the mountains of southern California, and into Baja California.

Habitat is coniferous forest: ponderosa and lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir, spruce, true fir, and pinyon-juniper at the lower edge. In much of the Mountain West and the higher country of the Southwest they are the default chickadee, and in the interior Pacific Northwest they occupy the dry pine forests east of the Cascade crest while Chestnut-backed Chickadees take the wet forests west of it.

Elevation depends on latitude. In Colorado and Utah they breed from roughly 6,000 feet (1,800 m) to timberline; in the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades somewhat lower; in southern California they are restricted to the mountain islands above the chaparral.

Why they appear at low elevation feeders in winter#

Mountain Chickadees do not migrate in the north-south sense. What many of them do instead is drop downhill. After breeding, birds move from high conifer forest into foothills, valleys, pinyon-juniper woodland and town neighborhoods, then return upslope in spring.

That is the answer to the most common question about this bird: a yard in Reno, Boise, Denver, Bend or Flagstaff that has no chickadees in July can have a small flock in November. The birds are the same population, just a few thousand feet lower.

The size of the movement varies year to year, and it tracks the conifer seed crop and winter severity. In a poor cone year, more birds come down and they come down farther, occasionally out onto the plains well beyond any mountain.

What they eat and the feeder setup that works#

Summer is an insect diet: caterpillars, beetles, aphids, leafhoppers, wasps and spiders, gleaned from conifer needles, twigs and bark, often while hanging upside down at the tip of a branch. Winter shifts toward conifer seeds, other seeds, and food they stored themselves.

The feeder itself hardly matters, which is one of the pleasures of chickadees. A tube feeder with short perches suits them, a small hopper works, and a suet cage mounted against a trunk or post is used all winter. What they will not do is stay: a chickadee lands, takes one seed, and leaves for a branch to hammer it open or hide it.

That habit makes them look less numerous than they are. A steady trickle of single birds at a tube feeder may be a flock of a dozen cycling through. More detail on managing that is in how to attract chickadees.

Caching and memory#

Mountain Chickadees are scatter hoarders. Through late summer and fall they wedge single seeds and insect fragments into bark furrows, under lichen, in needle clusters and in conifer cones, using thousands of separate sites rather than one store.

They then find them again. This species has become one of the main study animals for how spatial memory varies with winter conditions, with work comparing chickadees from high, harsh elevations against birds from milder sites lower down, and generally finding better cache recovery in the harsher populations. It is an active field rather than a closed case, but the underlying behavior is easy to see from a window: watch a bird take a sunflower seed and follow where it goes.

Voice#

The call is a hoarser, buzzier version of the familiar chickadee scold, often written chick-a-zee-zee-zee, with a rougher quality than a Black-capped Chickadee's crisper delivery. As in other chickadees, more dee notes generally means more alarm.

The song is a clear whistle of three or four notes, usually descending, commonly written fee-bee-bay or hey sweetie. It carries a long way through open pine forest and is often the first sign the birds are back upslope in spring.

Nesting and nest boxes#

Mountain Chickadees are cavity nesters. They use old woodpecker holes, natural cavities in dead conifers and aspens, and will excavate soft rotten wood themselves. Standing dead trees are the limiting resource in a lot of managed forest, which is worth remembering before you tidy up a snag: see snags, dead wood and leaf litter.

They take nest boxes readily. Use a 1 1/8 inch (2.9 cm) entrance hole, a floor around 4 by 4 inches (10 by 10 cm), and put 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of wood shavings in the bottom so the birds can excavate down through it. Mount it 5 to 15 feet (1.5 to 4.5 m) up near conifers, and see nest boxes: sizing and siting for hole sizes and predator guards.

The nest itself is a moss and bark cup lined thickly with fur and hair. Clutches run large, often 5 to 9 white eggs with reddish spotting. The female incubates about 14 days, both parents feed the young, and chicks leave the nest roughly 18 to 21 days after hatching. Females hiss loudly when disturbed on the nest, a snake-like sound that startles anyone opening a box.

Population and conservation#

Mountain Chickadees remain common and widespread across the western mountains, and they carry no conservation designation of concern. Their fortunes are tied to conifer forest, so the large-scale changes reshaping western woods, severe fire seasons and bark beetle outbreaks, matter more than anything happening in a backyard.

That relationship cuts both ways. Beetle-killed and burned forest produces standing dead wood and a short-term glut of insects, which chickadees exploit, before the cavities eventually fall. Diversity of forest age is what keeps them steady.

A Mountain Chickadee setup that works#

• Black oil sunflower in a tube feeder, up from late September and kept full through winter.
• A suet cage against a post or trunk, which is the single best cold-weather addition.
• A nest box with a 1 1/8 inch (2.9 cm) hole and wood shavings in the bottom, up by March.
• Conifers left standing, including dead ones where they are safe to keep.
• Water year-round, which in the interior West often matters more than anyone expects.