Chickadees are very verbose birds. They sing fee-bee when amorous. They scold chick-a-dee, adding more dees the higher their anxiety. And when the risk is acute, such as a soaring hawk overhead, they shriek.
“That shriek means ‘freeze’ to the flock,” says Arch McCallum, a retired biology professor and the lead expert on mountain chickadees for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of The World.
If you live in the Mountain West, a vocal black, white and gray bird might be a black-capped chickadee or its closest cousin, a mountain chickadee. The two are similar in size, about 4 inches long, with large heads, long tails and small bills. Both have a prominent black cap, white cheeks, light gray to buff sides, and a black throat patch, but only mountain…
