Winter Chickadees

If you’re anything like our two kittens, winter birds may be one of your favorite things. Our most frequent feeder visitors are chickadees, which overwinter here in Wisconsin.

A friend recently gifted me Stan Tekiela’s book A Year in Nature and it provided me with excellent new knowledge about how chickadees can survive the winter.

• They double the number of feathers that cover their body, from around 1,000 in summer to 2,000 in winter.

• Fluffing up their feathers increases the amount of air between those feathers, helping to insulate the bird from the cold.

• Chickadees need to eat about 15% of their body weight in fat to keep up their layer of inner insulation and to fuel their bodies.

• Besides flying, chickadees need to continually shiver to keep warm. Their bodies are around 109 degrees Fahrenheit, and shivering helps to maintain this temperature.

• At night, chickadees go into a state of torpor. This means they slow their bodies down - not even shivering - to the point of unconsciousness. This helps conserve energy until they get moving again in the morning.

How can you help these chickadees? Put out black-oil sunflower seeds, suet, or dried mealworms to help them reach the amount of fat they need to stay alive. And as you/your children/your cats watch the birds, read the book The Chickadee Spirit by Bill O. Smith. It’s a great book to imagine what the animals do during those long winter nights!