The Story
Food number four is a pale shelled peanut, pinched in the tip of the bill, and the black-capped chickadee holding it opens wide enough to show a pink gape. Black cap, white cheek and black bib fill the frame, and gray wire rises beside its tail, the edge of a backyard feeder.
This is one stop on a numbered menu. A backyard filmer shot chickadees up close in 4K eating eight foods: shelled, black-oil and striped sunflower seeds, shelled peanuts, safflower, suet, mealworms and nyjer.
Sunflower in its three forms fills the first minute after the intro. Peanuts then hold the screen longest of any single food, 33 seconds, while nyjer closes the list in about seven. That is screen time and nothing more. The numbers order the list, and the filmer's notes never call one food the favorite.
The menu reads well against the bird's own year. A chickadee lives mostly on insects, seeds and berries, and seeds and fruit may be no more than 10 percent of its summer diet but up to 50 percent in winter. Summer means mostly caterpillars, other insects and spiders, plus berries. Winter brings insect eggs and pupae, seeds and berries, and the bird will eat fat from dead animals.
At feeders this species tests each sunflower seed for plumpness and throws out empty shells before opening them, chasing the most calories for the least effort. It may also take sunflower seeds one at a time and fly off to stuff them into bark crevices, and in fall it can store up to 1,000 seeds a day. At 0.3 to 0.5 oz, eating more than 35 percent of its weight daily to stay warm, it has little room for waste.
The filmer rates chickadees small but bold, often the first birds to check out new foods and feeders in the yard. This one, at least, is not turning down the peanut.
