By late December, when black bears have experienced a couple of significant snowfalls, and bear hibernation is assured, the black-capped chickadee utters its first modest cheeps. It’s feeder time, they suggest. Once established, chickadees will routinely visit the same feeder at the same hours, going through the rituals of appeasement and displacement as the core groups assemble around the feeder.
The chickadee is not a spectacular bird: a droll black, white, and, gray. Nor is winter it’s song season, naturally. What the chickadee excels at during winter is resilience. Born in spring, the chickadee will thrive in summer and fall, then prepare for winter hunkering down in a tree hollow or other safe place. Its seasonal home becomes its essential refuge in winter. One only imagines how this lowly bird can survive winter in a treehole! Resilient is as modest a characteristic as the bird itself — how can it survive sub-zero freezing conditions, even to leave their hollows and take their turn at a feeder without succumbing to weather that easiy overwhelms a comparably dressed human being? See chickadees hovering around a feeder while snow falls is unintentionally a spectacular sight.
Another characteristic of modesty is found in a simple comparison of the chickadee to other songbirds. The chickadee’s song is a modest several cheeps, essentially saying its name, sufficiently audible in moderate seasons, though not particularly melodious. While the poets of Japan celebrated the hototoguisu (cuckoo) for its haunting song, that is not a bird to be seen from its forest recesses, frustrating those who ever hope to view it. This is the hototoguiso’s strength or charm, after all, for its haunting song in Asian forests suggests mystery. The chickadee will pose no rivalry to the great songbirds.
Thoreau does not mention the chickadee, but the naturalist-popularizer John Burroughs (1837-1921), writing in his book Birds and Poets, declares the chickadee to be
“a truly Emersonian bird, and the poet [Emerson] shows him to be both a hero and a philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a winter bird no less than a summer, a defier of both frost and heat, lover of the pine-tree, and diligent searcher after truth in the shape of eggs and larvae of insects, preëminently a New England bird, clad in black and ashen gray, with a note the most cheering and reassuring to be heard in our January woods. I know of none other of our birds so well calculated to captivate the Emersonian muse.
“Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius — a winter bird with a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer songster. His lines have little melody to the ear, but they have the vigor and distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are like the needles of the pine — ‘the snow loving pine’ — more than the emotional foliage of the deciduous trees.” …
“Softly — but this way fate was pointing,
‘T was coming fast to such anointing,
When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chick-chickadeedee! saucy note,
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said ‘Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings few faces. …
Softly — but his way fate was pointing.
T’was coming fast to such anointing,
When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chick-chickadeedee! saucy note,
Out if sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said ‘Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings new faces.’”
Thus does Burroughs celebrate the lowly but indomitable and resilient chickadee. He notes that chickadees are “more or less complacent and cheerful during the winter.” But he holds that chickadees are reliant in winter because they find sufficient insects regardless of cold and freezing conditions.
“It is doubtful if these birds ever freeze when fuel enough can be had to keep their little furnaces going. And, as they get their food entirely from the limbs and trunks of trees, like the woodpeckers, their supply is seldom interfered with by the snow. The worst annoyance must be the enameling of ice our winter woods sometimes get … Indeed, the food question seems to be the only serious one with the birds.”
Is a share of seeds with the chickadees an extravagance? The birds are sociable — or at least, they live in society — and our sharing is a form of sociability. Without that proffering they would be silent and aloof in the woods, oblivious to human presence. Opportunism is the lowest motive we can ascribe to their interest in the seeds put out for them. Where the Japanese depicted the hototogishu as virtual hermit-artists or musicians aloof in the woods, pursuing their art as counterparts of the hermit poets, so, too, the chikadees, like Burroughs – and Emerson in his best solitude essays – remain aloof and never share a morsel with their human counterparts, just a musical morsel in the balmy summers of life.
Like all creatures, chickadees reflect the melancholy reality of impermanence. We see dozens of birds a day but how to distinguish them individually in the future? Is it not so with humanity, even as we lament over the fates of so many? The chickadee lives about a year and a half. Born in spring, robust in summer, reflective in autumn, they then undergo their first winter. Many of the chickadees at the feeder are doubtless of this age. If they survive the winter we would know of the progress of their modest time of life.
Then spring and summer return, their time to reproduce, to share their wisdom (if such could be done!). Like the leaves (but not, as Emerson celebrates, the leaves of the pine), autumn represents the waning of life, of the animating spark. Neither the hardwood leaves nor the the older chickdees will live another winter. How many birds at the feeder this morning will succumb, will pass away, in another year? We only know that the flow of life will continue. And tht the chickadees, so indistinguishable one bird from another, will not reveal their secrets for resilience, nor articulate their thoughts to us.