Watch a chickadee at a feeder. Notice how it takes one seed, flies to a nearby branch, holds the seed with its feet, and cracks it open. This small ritual, repeated countless times each day, reveals something essential about these birds that both scientists and poets have tried to capture.
Mary Oliver spent decades observing chickadees in the woods of Province town. In Blue Horses (2014), she writes of their presence: “I have been thinking about living like the chickadee, who surveys the huge spaces above him, the forest that is his home, and is content.”
Between the feeding stations and forest edges, chickadees demonstrate what Susan Cerulean calls “impossible courage” in her work Coming to Pass (2015). These birds, she notes, navigate their world with an audacity that seems to defy their size.
What is it, after all, that intelligence serves?
Sometimes only itself, like a bird
singing in the bush, content with its own noise.
— Mary Oliver, “Red Bird”
Bernd Heinrich, in Winter World (2003), reveals the remarkable adaptations that allow chickadees to survive winter nights when temperatures plummet below freezing. “They enter a controlled hypothermia,” he writes, “reducing their body temperature by as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit to conserve energy.” This scientific observation carries its own poetry – each night, these birds dance at the edge of death, only to emerge again with the morning sun.
The social structure of chickadee flocks reveals another layer of sophistication. In Bird Sense (2012), Tim Birkhead describes their complex hierarchical system, where individuals recognize and remember the status of dozens of flock mates. “Their calls,” he writes, “contain information not just about identity but about the location of food, the presence of predators, and even the caller’s emotional state.”
I’ve been busy
going everywhere, looking
for the small, black-capped birds
who dart and dive between trees,
calling to each other in their warm, electric voices.
— Mary Oliver, “First Snow”
These calls, which we often reduce to simple “chick-a-dee-dee” notes, contain multitudes. Christopher Norment explains in In the Memory of the Map (2012) that chickadees add more “dee” notes to their calls when they perceive greater threat levels. “Each ‘dee’ is a unit of measurement,” he writes, “quantifying danger in a language we are only beginning to understand.”
Their intelligence extends beyond communication. Chickadees can remember thousands of locations where they’ve hidden food, a feat that requires a seasonal enlargement of the hippocampus – the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory. This transformation, documented by Colin Saldanha in The Nature of Winter (2018), represents one of the most dramatic examples of brain plasticity in the natural world.
Oliver returns to chickadees throughout her work, finding in them a model for living: “I would rather sit on the ground in the woods than anywhere else,” she writes in Long Life (2004). “Except possibly with the chickadees, who have nothing to do with my sitting or not sitting, and everything to do with the way they live their quick, beautiful lives.”
This intersection of poetry and science reveals chickadees not just as subjects of study or symbols in verse, but as beings that challenge our understanding of consciousness and adaptation. They navigate their world with a precision that seems both calculated and carefree, embodying what Oliver might call the perfect balance of attention and grace.
In their presence, we find a reminder of life’s persistence. Through winter storms and summer heat, they maintain their society, their songs, their intricate dance of survival. They demonstrate, in their own way, what it means to be fully present in the world – a lesson as valuable to the scientist in the field as it is to the poet at her desk.
As we observe these birds – whether through binoculars or the lens of poetry – we witness creatures that have mastered the art of living simply yet completely. They remind us, as Oliver suggests in her final collection Devotions (2017), that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” In paying attention to chickadees, we might learn something essential about both nature and ourselves.
