Final Four Championship—My Favorite Bird of 2021: Black-capped Chickadee

Of all the twenty-one-hundred-plus bird species I’ve seen in my lifetime, the one I’ve seen in more places and on more days than any other is the Black-capped Chickadee. It was the very first bird I saw when I first went out with binoculars and my field guide on March 2, 1975, and from that moment I was smitten. 

If I were to be stuck on a desert island for months or years with only one kind of bird for company, I'd definitely want it to be the chickadee. Most other birds would keep their distance, and virtually none would make eye contact. Chickadees are wonderfully sociable, and not just with their own kind. Jays and other corvids would probably also keep me company, but they're more judgmental. If I did one thing wrong, even something I didn't know was wrong, they'd shun me for life and warn all their companions to do the same thing. Chickadees are much more forgiving. 

So chickadees are the #1 bird on my Top Ten Favorite Birds of All, but they’d have to do something pretty unusual to get on my Top Ten Birds for any given year, much less win that year's championship. And this year there was stiff competition, especially from three species—the Pileated Woodpeckers who are hanging around my yard all the time now, the Evening Grosbeaks who visited my yard in big numbers every day from April 25 through May 18, and the Rufous Hummingbird who absorbed almost all my attention from November 6 through December 4. Yet as I review 2021, my regular old backyard chickadees edged out everyone else, not just reaching the Final Four but taking home the trophy. What could they possibly have done to achieve this?  

It all started on April 10 when I looked out my dining room window to see two chickadees together at a cavity in Russ’s old cherry tree. They were busy taking turns hacking into a hole, digging out a nesting cavity deep inside the dead wood. Might they actually nest in my backyard where I could watch them every day?   

I've photographed nesting chickadees before, digging the cavity, bringing food in, and taking out fecal sacs. And in 2015, one of my most beloved chickadees of all time, a male who'd had a badly overgrown bill (the tip finally broke off) and was permanently missing three toes, successfully nested at my neighbor Jeanne's house. I got to watch both parents bringing in food and also when three of the babies left the nest. 

But I didn't learn about them until the day before they fledged. I'm sure chickadees have nested in my own yard many times over the years, but I don't like searching out nests because my jays and crows follow me when I'm outdoors, and tiny nestlings are one of their favorite foods. Never had I watched an entire chickadee nesting cycle before, much less in such an easy-to-see spot.  

Talk about counting your fledglings before the eggs are laid! Even as I was thinking through how fantastic this could be, I suddenly realized there was a hole just four inches below the one they were working on. A chickadee nest chamber inside a cavity averages 8 inches in depth, which meant when the birds dug down to the level of that second hole, they’d abandon ship. 

They’d already been working so hard that I wanted to help if I could, so I found a large piece of bark and entirely covered that lower entrance. 

That saved the day—the chickadees finished excavating and started building a nest inside. 

 

Eden, the girl across the street, brought me some fur from her dog Ranger which I set out in my window feeder. On April 23, I got photos and video of the mother plucking a big wad of that fur. (How do I know this was the mother? Both birds in the pair work together to excavate, but only the female builds the nest.) 

  

My trail cam caught her carrying it into the nest.  

Finally, after a couple of weeks of watching their comings and goings at the entrance, I stopped seeing activity at the nest. That meant either they'd abandoned it or the female was laying eggs—before she had a full clutch, both birds would avoid the nest except during the brief time each morning when she was laying an egg. 

On May 3, my trail cam caught a short video of both birds leaving the cavity together. That was almost certainly after the male came to feed the incubating female—she probably followed him out to take a bathroom break, groom herself, and find some of her own food. 

May 15th was the first time my trail cam caught a bird carrying tiny caterpillars into the nest. I think a male bringing food to his mate would have chosen larger grubs or some of the mealworms I set out in my window feeder, so I presumed the nestlings had hatched and this was one or the other parent feeding them.  

That presumption may have been premature but I'll never know. It supposedly takes at most 16 days for babies to fledge—the later the better. If the young had hatched on or before May 15, they'd be fledging by May 30, but they didn’t until June 4. The young are also supposed to climb up to and look out the entrance for a few days before fledging, but I never once observed a young bird peeking out until the very day they fledged.

So what was happening on May 15 when the bird brought in tiny caterpillars? It was puzzling—I suppose the male might have been feeding his incubating mate very tiny grubs, but based on how well developed the plumage was on the fledglings, it’s also possible they simply didn’t leave the nest until they were 21 days old.  

These two parents had long been my everyday birds who took mealworms from my hand, so they trusted me near their nest taking photos. They continued coming to me for mealworms during this whole process, but only once did I ever see one carry a mealworm to the nest. They seemed to gobble them down as a quick, easy meal for themselves in between searching for more natural fare for their babies. 

I got an amazing array of photos... 

...a very high quality video of one baby fledging... 

...and photos of that one after its inaugural flight to a tree at my neighbors’ house. 

I still thrill to see the photos of that one little baby—the result of so many dedicated weeks of parental care. 

To top all that off, my baby grandson Walter paid a whole lot of attention to the chickadees coming to the feeder by my office window, where we set a crib for his naps while my daughter's family was living with us, and now he watches them at his own feeder hanging out his living room window. He's charmed by how each chickadee flies in, grabs a seed, and flies off.  From morning till night we can watch them coming and going, his face lighting up with every visit as we said "Hello, chickadee!" and then "Bye-bye, chickadee!" Being that kind of a grandma, I even made up "The Chickadee Song" just for Walter. 

This was our beloved cherry tree's last stand. It was dead and riddled with holes, and so this fall we cut it down so one of its suckers could take over. I was so thrilled that this splendid tree, which has given me so much joy in past years, gave one more year of pleasure. Now its own little offshoot will take its place. 

Between my joy at the chickadees giving that cherry tree one final hurrah, my joy at watching the whole nesting cycle, and Baby Walter’s joy seeing chickadees so much, the Black-capped Chickadee sailed past its Final Four competitors to win the championship, truly my favorite bird of 2021. 

The Final Four: My Top Ten Birds of 2021: Evening Grosbeak

On May 1, 1976, when I’d been birding for a little over a year, Russ and I went on a Michigan Audubon field trip to northern Michigan. We camped the night before in a National Forest campground so we could be at our meeting place for viewing Michigan’s last Greater Prairie-Chicken Lek before first light. From the blind, I added two lifers in addition to the prairie chicken—Upland Sandpiper and Greater Yellowlegs. After the prairie chicken flock dispersed, we went on to Hartwick Pines State Park for a breakfast stop and a short hike on which I added two more lifers—Pine Warbler and Evening Grosbeak, but I was more charmed by a Brown Creeper nest wedged into a large piece of pine bark, right at my eye level. Then we went on to Whitefish Point, where I added four more lifers—Ring-billed Gull, Osprey, Sharp-shinned Hawk, and LeConte’s Sparrow. Our group rented cabins and spent the night in Paradise, Michigan, and first thing the next morning I saw my first Long-eared Owl, just released from the Whitefish Point banding station, and before heading back to Lansing saw four more lifers—Greater Scaup, Orange-crowned Warbler, Rusty Blackbird, and Purple Finch. The weekend was so very exciting that the Evening Grosbeaks I saw at Hartwick Pines didn’t stand out particularly. 

In the following years, after we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, I saw Evening Grosbeaks at my favorite Madison park, Picnic Point, and many times up in Port Wing where my in-laws bought a house and retired. 

Then in 1981, Russ and I moved to Duluth. That July as we walked into our house on Peabody Street for the very first time, I added two yard birds—a Bald Eagle circling overhead, and Evening Grosbeaks calling from our trees. It took a couple of days to get our stuff organized before Russ could set out our first bird feeders. The first birds to discover it, within an hour of getting the feeders out, were chickadees and Evening Grosbeaks.  

And just like that, this lovely bird became one of my top ten favorite birds of all time. During the 1980s, as my children were born and became toddlers and preschoolers, Evening Grosbeaks provided the soundtrack of our daily lives from July or August each year through May, with a few even showing up during nesting season. When the windows were open, their calls filled our house, and even when the windows were closed tightly in winter, the gentle but persistent calls somehow wafted in. 

Somehow I never tired of hearing or watching them. Even before Russ and I moved to Duluth, I’d noticed how my in-laws’ Port Wing birds started developing green beaks with the first intimations of spring, right as those green-beaked birds started courting and feeding one another. Now, as family groups showed up in my yard in July and August, I watched young birds beg from green-billed birds and started realizing that the adults’ bill color reflected the period in their annual cycle when they were hormonally primed to feed either their mate or begging young. Evening Grosbeak society fully reflects the concept of it taking a village to raise a child. Once I watched a juvenile beg successfully from three different adult males in succession. I wish I'd been photographing birds at that point! I only have one photo of an adult feeding a juvenile, from 2011.

One fall, back in the 1980s when my yard was filled with hundreds of grosbeaks, I picked out a very odd individual right in my window feeder—a bird bearing male plumage on half its body and female plumage on the other half, which made it a gynandromorph. I studied it from just inches away for many minutes, but when a migrating hawk scared off the flock in a sudden frenzy, I lost sight of it. 

Bilateral Gynandromorph in the Bell Museum collection, between a normal male and female.  

The Bell Museum has a handful of gynandromorph Evening Grosbeaks in their collection. Most female birds have just one functional ovary, and gynandromorphs also have one functional testis. The wing on the male side of their body measures slightly larger than that on the female side. I tried very hard to locate my living specimen again because I wanted to study how it flew to compensate for unmatched wings, but I never saw it again. 

Evening Grosbeak decline in the Central states and provinces between 1967 and 2012 

I didn’t know it when we moved here, but Evening Grosbeaks were already starting to decline in the state. The Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas notes that their breeding numbers here dropped an average of 3.3 percent each year between 1967 and 2015, and a Partners in Flight study found a 94 percent reduction nationally between 1970 and 2014. It was heartbreaking to go from having hundreds daily in my yard for most of each year to going several years at a time without a single sighting. The one place I could count on seeing them each year has been the Sax-Zim Bog, but even those were increasingly difficult to find except at one feeding station in the northwest corner of the bog. 

Russ had surgery in August 2011, and when I brought him home on August 3, he was still in a lot of pain and slept restlessly the first night. But we woke in the morning to a lovely sound—Evening Grosbeaks! A flock of 16 stayed in and near our yard every day through the end of the month, and at least four stuck around through September 6, their gentle calls balm to our souls. I got a lot of photos. 

If I were keeping Top Ten lists of my best birds each year, Evening Grosbeaks would have easily made it each year of the 1980s and 2011, but not again until this year, a banner year for winter finches. 

Russ and I went to the bog on January 3 and saw them not just at their one regular feeding station but at others as well. And a handful showed up in my yard in early April—I was thrilled. But then on April 25, a larger flock appeared, and they showed up every day after that until May 18. Many days I had 50 or more, with a full 250 here on April 27! 

Seeing so many was thrilling enough, but they spent a lot of time in the spruce tree right next to my office and eating in my office window feeder. My baby grandson Walter got a huge kick out of them, even my dog Pip noticed them, and I went crazy photographing them. 

Evening Grosbeaks were calling almost constantly, and one morning I figured out a good spot to set my equipment up to get an excellent sound recording of the birds in that nearby spruce tree. With them up close and personal and my window open, I was also hearing a little wink note I’d never noticed before, and got some recordings of that.  

As spring continued to unfold, I started hoping against hope that some grosbeaks might actually nest nearby, or at least close enough that they’d reappear in July, but except for a group of 5 that showed up briefly on November 9, I haven’t seen them in my yard since May. At least I have a bazillion close up photos. I’m actually more of an auditory than visual person, so I even more treasure my 50-minute recording of them. Whenever I listen to it, my heart fills with joy. 

So of course Evening Grosbeaks are in my Final Four top birds for 2021. For some reason, this is also the year that Hallmark made their annual "Beauty of Birds" keepsake ornament the Evening Grosbeak. The mass-produced ornament is a male, but they also made a limited-edition female. We don’t have a Hallmark store in Duluth anymore, but I managed to get both ornaments online. So for the rest of my life, whenever I decorate our Christmas tree, I’ll remember my lovely time with this splendid bird.

The Final Four: My Top Ten Birds of 2021: Rufous Hummingbird

When I was a pretty new birder in December 1978, Russ and I went to Texas—he had a meeting in Corpus Christi, and before and after the meeting, he and I went birding to several great spots around the Rio Grande River. When New Years Day 1979 rolled around, I saw the tiniest bird I’d ever seen in my life, a Rufous Hummingbird, at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.  

Back then, I was at that stage intermediate birders go through of being cocksure about our identification abilities, but this didn’t seem at all questionable—my Golden Guide showed only two hummingbirds that ranged in that part of Texas in winter (the area of the map that is blue or purple), the Rufous and Buff-bellied, and Buff-bellied has a bright red bill.  

Now we know that hummingbirds do much more wandering than was understood back then, so if this one had been a female, my identification would have been suspect, but fortunately, he was unmistakably a male Rufous Hummingbird, so as I started recognizing some of the trickier possibilities, I never had to reconsider whether he truly belonged on my life list.  

I didn’t see another Rufous Hummingbird until 1982, when Russ and I went to Arizona. On April 9, we went to Ramsey Canyon, one of the single best hummingbird viewing spots in the United States, with lots of possibilities for lifers. We got there at 3:30 pm, planning to spend a couple of hours at the feeding station so I could study the different species at leisure, but it turns out they closed the gates at 4 pm, so we had only a half hour there—possibly the most intense 30 minutes of birding I've ever had.  

Not all the hummingbirds were lifers—in 1979, I’d seen both Broad-tailed in Estes Park, Colorado, and Calliope at Mount Rainier in Washington, and on this very trip I’d already added four hummingbirds to my life list at other southeastern Arizona hotspots. But Ramsey Canyon was exceptional, and watching so very many hummingbirds zipping this way and that among several feeders was as bewildering as it was fun.

Allen’s and Rufous are both in the genus Selasphorus—some authorities believe the two species should be lumped as one. Females are virtually identical and males are very similar, but Allen’s has more green on the back. The moment I’d for sure seen one male who was clearly all rufous on the back and one with green, I started ignoring both species, trying to get more lifers in the precious minutes I still had before the gates closed. Rufous was just one of many western hummingbirds—very cool, but no more special than any of the others.  

In July 2001, Russ and I went on a cruise on a small, Native-owned ship in Alaska’s Inside Passage, and spent a couple of days birding in Juneau before and after the cruise. That’s when I started appreciating that Rufous Hummingbirds are pretty darned hardy—we saw several on that trip.   

The very next month, I got to spend a couple of days near New Orleans with Nancy Newfield, one of the finest, most experienced hummingbird banders in the world, which is when I got to see a stunning male Rufous Hummingbird up close and personal. Nancy told me how pugnacious this tiny species is, standing out in a family of pugnacious birds. Rufous, which averages slightly smaller than Ruby-throats, invariably takes over feeders, chasing every other hummingbird off, including significantly larger species. I took a lot of photos for the Journey North educational website.  

I didn’t have many opportunities to travel to the West and didn't see another Rufous for over three years, when finally a female took pity. In sort of a reversal of Francis Bacon’s famous “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain,” she came to Peabody Street on November 16, 2004. That tiny hummingbird was definitely one of my Top Ten birds of that year. Every day for over two weeks, dozens of birders showed up on Peabody Street to add her to their Minnesota lists and even their life lists. By then, birders were starting to realize that many Rufous Hummingbirds wander east, some being found in Ohio and Pennsylvania, so my bird provided an important data point, but female Rufous are almost identical to female Allen’s Hummingbirds. Allen’s was very unlikely, but the smattering of confirmed records of Allen’s Hummingbirds in the East meant there existed a shadow of a doubt about my hummingbird’s identification, so the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee counted her only as Selasphorus sp. 

There was a blizzard on December 2, and temps that night dropped to just 6º, so I got up on December 3 filled with trepidation, expecting to search for her tiny carcass somewhere beneath one of my shrubs or trees, but she was already at my window when I looked out at least a half hour before dawn, so I set out warm sugar water and watched her pig out for a few hours as the temperature rose to the 20s. She lit out for the territory at mid-morning. 

I got a job writing a blog for an optics company in 2005, which is when I started taking more bird photos in the field. At first, I was digiscoping—using a small digital camera held in place against my spotting scope, which is how I photographed Rufous Hummingbirds in Mexico in 2006. 

In August 2007, I photographed a Selasphorus hummingbird at a feeder in Wisconsin, but couldn’t confirm whether it was a female or a young male, much less a Rufous or Allen’s. The homeowner told me how pugnacious the little bird was, and I watched it chasing off every Ruby-throat.  

During my 2013 Big Year, I saw Rufous Hummingbirds in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. As wonderful as my Big Year was, it was also overwhelmingly intense—I did so much traveling to see over 600 species in a single year that many of the individual experiences I had, especially with birds that stayed in view for just seconds, blurred together.  

And that was that for my lifetime experiences with Rufous Hummingbirds until just this year. On November 6, my neighbor Jeanne told me that a hummingbird was coming to a feeder down the block. I headed right there and got a few photos. Oddly enough, the species we think of as the only hummingbird in the East, the Ruby-throat, would have been far rarer in November than several western species, and sure enough, this was no Ruby-throat. It was a Selasphorus!  

I figured out pretty quickly that like my previous November hummingbird, this was a female. And when she wasn’t visiting feeders, she was spending only a bit of her time resting. She explored every nook and cranny of our neighborhood. Jeanne and I both set up hummingbird feeders in our own yards, and within an hour or so, she discovered both! She came many times every day through December 4, breaking the record for late date of any hummingbird in St. Louis County set by my previous hummingbird. She spent that final day here pigging out, while temperatures were in the 40s but winds were unfavorable for migration. Then an hour or so before sunset, when the winds died down and shifted to the northwest, she lit out for the territory.  

During her extended visit, now that I have excellent camera equipment, I took thousands of photos of her through an open window right at my feeder and a nearby tree. I also took pictures and video at a feeder on my front porch—that’s where I got a lovely slo-mo video of her. 

From the detailed photos, we figured out that she had to be an adult female Rufous Hummingbird. This time we weren’t simultaneously having a Great Gray Owl invasion so not nearly as many birders were here in Duluth to look at her, but over the four weeks she was here, dozens did show up.

And because I didn’t have an owl invasion to distract me and did have a pandemic to keep me home right when my daughter and son-in-law took my grandson to New York to spend a few weeks, I spent hours every day watching this tiny visitor, really getting to know her. 

For me, to know a bird really is to love it—intimate looks at behavior are what grabs me as a birder—and watching this tiny sprite, so unabashed during a couple of snowstorms and a few days when highs barely reached 20º, her pluckiness and sheer hardiness filled me with admiration and abiding love. Of course she's way at the top of my Top Ten list for my best birds of 2021, but she also managed to work herself into a place in my Top Ten Favorite Birds of All Time.