Chickadee Caching and Foraging Behavior (Mini Documentary)

You may have noticed that chickadees aren't one to stick around on a feeder to eat their seeds, as other birds do, preferring instead to collect a seed and go off elsewhere to eat it, or to hide it away for later feeding. For most of the year, a great deal of a chickadee's diet consists of insects and other animal food. To find these juicy insects, they glean over the And thanks to their incredible acrobatic skills, obtaining food in hard-to-reach places is no real trouble for the chickadee, whether it be insects hidden on the underside of leaves or a berry at the end of a twig. In winter, though, the good eating ends, and since chickadees don't migrate, they change their diet to eating more of plant matter, and they get busy in fall caching food away. This is why chickadees appear so busy at your feeders in fall. Most of these seeds are being taken to the forest where they search for cracks in the bark of trees to hide their precious cargo for the lean time ahead. Hundreds and hundreds of seeds are hidden in the trees throughout their territory, and they never use the same cache site twice. It may seem like a lot of places to remember for such a tiny bird, but you need not to worry because chickadees have a remarkable ability to remember every hiding place. They can even remember all of these hiding places for up to a month or longer, thanks to their use of remembered visual-spatial cues such as the arrangement of trees and other items in the vicinity of their cache site. To help your cheerful little chickadees during the cold winter season, offer them good quality food such as high-energy soot. Since they aren't getting much animal food in their diet these days, they'll eagerly gobble up as much as they can, and it'll greatly help them through those cold days and nights. And you can never go wrong with black oil sunflower seeds. Chickadees love them, and so do many other birds, and it's no wonder when you consider the high fat content within the kernels, something that is extremely valuable for most winter birds. But don't worry if you can't get the feeders topped up some days, because the trees of the forest, like spruce and tamarack, harvests plenty of nutritious seeds for everyone.