The Long-Tailed Chickadee 



By P. B. Peabody 



OHEMIANS in winter, eremites during the breeding time: such 

 are the Chickadees. No birds are better known for the stark, 

 dreary days when snow hides the wastes; while very few are 

 more perfectly strangers to the mass of non-critical bird-lovers 

 during the period wherein every Chickadee rake and hoiden is transformed 

 into a tender parent: solicitious, now, and wary, and very strangely still. 



The western race of the Black-cap, sturdier, every way, than its eastern and 

 southern fellows, is yet quite their counterpart in matters of general habit. 

 There is the same cheery, care-free winter roaming, in little "families" of 

 from six to fifteen; there is the identical charming impudence during the 

 hours of play and of food pursuit; and no differentia are apparent in 

 the character of notes and in the periods or conditions of their utterance. 

 The nesting habit, however, is quite another matter. 



Like the Black-cap, the Long-tail would seem to have his times of decid- 

 ed winter wandering. In Northern Minnesota, for example, we have quite 

 commonly in winter a fair abundance of what Mr. Brewster guardedly 

 wrote-down, once, in a letter to the writer hereof, as, — " what is commonly 

 known as septeiitrionalis." Yet in summer, throughout the same region, I 

 never found, though spending many days among their familiar winter haunts, 

 more than a single pair of chickadees. In Wyoming, too, we have the typ- 

 ical race, herein exploited, occuring very commonly in winter; while the 

 relative summer abundance seems, at least, to be considerably less. These 

 conditions are all the more marked since, as a rule, areas of winter habitance 

 and of summer residence are fairly identical. 



Food considerations, however, modify this observed fact. While, in 

 Wyoming, the chief pastures, winter and summer, are in the sapling bull 

 pines, the Chickadees naturally gravitate in summer into the insect-swarm- 

 ing precincts of the willowy, aspen-studded canyons. Conversely, we are 

 not nearly so apt to find the Lo ng-tailed Chickadee during the breeding 

 time in the vicinity of Wyoming homes as we are when food is scarcer and 

 more snugly hidden from even a clever and a keen-eyed searching. 



Relatively weak of beak, though sturdy enough of physique, the Black- 

 capped Chickadee, as a genus, would seem to favor greatly the rottenest of 



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