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Little Tough Guy |
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by Scott Gundersen |
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One of the blessings of living at Seven Springs is the proximity of Bear Creek and the greenbelt. Residents here will tell you that nature is right outside your door. Sometimes the deer come by, and although they may even eat some of the flowers, nobody seems to mind. When you run outside your door in the morning late for work and you see the deer at the edge of the woods, you take a moment just to stand and watch, and then as you go on your way, you don't feel as rushed. I remember when I first looked at my condo with my realtor. I turned the corner
of the building and saw, sitting on a windbreak fence, a tiny bird, a black-capped chickadee. This bird, smaller
than a sparrow, has a black cap and a black bib which contrasts clearly
with a white face. It has a gray back and buffy sides, and a white/tawny
colored belly. It looks clean. It is called a chickadee because of the
sound of its' song: Well, I bought the condo, and soon after I bought a bird feeder. For a couple of days there wasn't any action at the bird feeder, except for one chickadee that would quietly sneak in, grab a seed, and fly off. Then, the action exploded. All sorts of birds came by: juncos, flickers, wrens, song sparrows, and who knows what else. My chickadee still visited, but he was often outnumbered. Chickadees are tiny birds that have a tough life. Unlike many other birds, they don't fly south in the winter to bask in the warmth of such vacation spots like Acapulco. For some reason they have evolved to stay put and tough it out. Because of their small size, they have a greater surface area compared to their mass, and they must eat constantly in order to maintain their body heat. On a cold day, if they can't find food, they run the risk of depleting their fat reserves and freezing to death. If it's very cold, even a healthy chickadee could starve to death overnight. Yet, somehow, enough of them survive. There's more than one chickadee visitor to my feeder now, but I like to think that the first chickadee I saw still comes by. It's possible. I discovered through some research that one chickadee was recorded to live for 12 years and five months! These little guys don't give up. If sparrows are at the
feeder they can't get near or they'll get pushed aside or even pecked.
They just perch on a nearby branch, seemingly impatient, singing their
song: He's so smart, sometimes he hears me when I'm filling the feeder. He'll come near, knowing that the sparrows are frightened far away. He dashes in the moment I step back. But here he seems to be picking the best seed because he'll take his time as long as I don't look at him directly or approach to within an arm's length. He's definitely smarter than the sparrows. Chickadees survive the winter by eating seeds, typically from pine cones and plants like that. In the summer they spend countless hours hopping among the branches looking in every cranny for their favorite food, spiders. When female chickadees are in the nest incubating the eggs, the male will bring food to her. Although dead spiders don't seem to be the best gift to give your loved one, with the chickadees I guess it is a matter of personal taste. A biologist would say that this is solely a mating ritual or an attempt by the male to fatten up the female to increase the odds that she will be healthy enough to pass on his genes. I'm not so sure. These little guys have so much spunk, isn't it possible that it might be something more? Sources: Birds of Denver and the Front Range, Chris C. Fisher
and Greg Butcher, Lone Pine Publishing, 1997. |