Ten years ago, with the help of some great local photographers, I produced a calendar that featured 12 conservation properties in Peterborough, telling their stories, one a month, that included the people who conserved them.
Turns out the calendar works for 2017. Want a 2006 calendar that works for 2017? The price is right, $0. Let me know.
The calendars (I’ve done three now) have almanac entries relating to the natural world, and for January 5 the entry is “DEE-dee, the chickadee sings, knowing the sun rose earlier today.” At our latitude this year the sun will rise at 7:19 the first week in January until the 8th , when it rises at 7:18, earlier for the first time.
I mark that turnaround day by listening for the black-capped chickadee’s DEE- dee spring song. I like to think chickadees know and celebrate the return of morning light.
It’s the time of day most important to a chickadee’s winter survival.
Increasing day length doesn’t mean warmer days, but it does mean extended light to find food that fuels them through the frigid winter nights ahead.
At our chilly latitude, birds spend just about all the daylight hours feeding up so they can burn calories that warm them through the long, dark night.
In the depths of winter, a chickadee eats about 20 times its summer fare.
As added survival tool, they can slow their metabolism at night to enter a torpor that burns fewer calories. This induced hypothermia reduces their body temperature some 13 degrees or so.
A Cornell study determined that chickadees can’t store enough fat to make it through the coldest nights if they maintained the same body temperature. Torpor to the rescue.
Another component of winter survival is finding an overnight roost site, ideally a small space that protects a very small chickadee body from wind-chill conditions.
Birch trees, with their soft, easily excavated wood, are a chickadee’s favorite nesting and roost tree.
Come morning light, they rev up again for an early start and emerge from their roost site, returned from the edge of starvation.
As anyone with a backyard birdfeeder knows, chickadees form winter flocks after the breeding season. In they come to take turns at a feeder, often bringing others along.
Chickadees are chatty birds, and other species tag along with them, relying on chickadee chatter to maintain contact with each other. There’s also a certain safety in numbers that provide more eyes watchful for predators.
As I write, chickadee action isn’t at our feeders; it’s out in the weedy edge grown up along the chickenyard fence and stonewall beyond.
We leave our yard weedy for the wild ones.
There’s not much action at the feeders this warm day especially compared to the few snowy days that brought crowds of birds to the feeders.
One of those days caused the local Christmas Bird Count to be postponed, a first said Meade Cadot, organizer of the count over 40 years ago.
The count took place on last day of the year instead of our usual date a week or so before Christmas. I emailed the volunteers saying we would spike the soup at the potluck we’ll be hosting at day’s end. We can warm ourselves with soup and toast the New Year at the same time.
And go home early. I suspect the 40 or so volunteers that turn out each year are not New Year’s Eve revelers.
As for the chickadee I’ll listen for on January 8 as the sun rises earlier for the first time, it will most likely be the winter flock’s dominant male.
Why he sings his species’ spring song is a mystery. It won’t get a response until March or so when the winter flock begins to disperse for the breeding season ahead.
Songs then will relate to territory and courtship.
Another important date, of course, is January 1. Birders often note the first bird of the year, and my birding calendar often has “BCCH” for black-capped chickadee.
Not a bad way to start the birding year.
One last look to the feeders for chickadees found instead a new bird that dwarfs all the regulars: a Cooper’s hawk, pictured here in the old pear tree with a blurry feeder in the photo’s upper foreground.
A few camera clicks and it’s gone.
First returnees to the feeders a few minutes after the hawk departs: three BCCH.
And then, gradually at first, traffic at the feeders picks up including too many goldfinches to count, juncos gleaning below the feeders for seeds jostled loose, cardinals, the rare hairy woodpecker, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, tufted titmice. . .
Obviously the “All clear; predator gone!” word went out and was passed along.
It brought crowds to our feeders far surpassing any that is blizzard-induced.
May your year ahead be filled with the comfort of good company, birds included.