The Craftiest Workshop

While I love both dogs and cats, we currently do not have any of our own right now. We babysit my brother in-law’s dog a handful of weekends throughout the year but those are short visits. I do, however, have two specific chickadees that have come to rely on me this winter for peanuts whenever I am outside.

These two chickadees must be a mated pair. They are always together and the thinner one must be older as it has vision difficulties and a flat sounding bird call. I find it endearing to watch them together, always calling the other when they know I am going to feed them out of my hand.

Here is a video clip of how quickly they follow each other to grab a peanut and take it back to their nest.

I am fascinated by the sound of their wings flapping. It sounds like a very fast drum roll. I can recognize which type of bird is close to me by the speed of their flapping wings.

If I don’t see the chickadees when I go outside, I can simply call them with “chick a dee dee dee dee dee” and within a couple minutes they will land on the nearest tree waiting to feed out of my hand. If I go out to snowshoe, they will follow me issuing sharp “tseedleedeet” sounds letting me know they are angry that I am ignoring them. Sometimes they give me quite the lecture.

We can heat our garage workshop but it gets quite costly so we do not do much in the way of woodworking during the cold winter months. Soon, though, I will be able to work in there and I think that one of the first projects will be some birdhouses that the chickadees can nest in. Maybe it will allow them a comfortable place to hatch some new baby chickadees for us to enjoy in the years going forward.

I have noticed that other birds respond when I do my chickadee call. The Blue Jays swoop down from high in the trees hoping I will drop them a peanut in the shell for them to take away. They are not yet comfortable with taking one from my hand and even need me to be five feet away or more before they come to grab a peanut. The Nuthatches have flown to my hand a few times but won’t land, perhaps unsure of a black gloved landing spot. Even the Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers come closer thinking I may have replaced the suet cake or have added more sunflower seeds to the feeder.

While I felt the need to burn the likeness of a chickadee onto wood, my husband felt the need to create a stained glass version of our chickadee couple. He mounted them by wrapping their wire legs around a screw drilled into a piece of driftwood. He even captured how one is visibly chubbier than the other.

I just learned that chickadees tend to not have long lifespans, sometimes only one or two years.
Visiting with them daily is always a bright spot in my day and I plan to enjoy them for as long I have them around.