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Chestnut-backed Chickadee | Poecile rufescens
Kastanjerugmees | Carbonero dorsicastaño
The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the chickadee of the wet conifer forests along the Pacific coast. It is the only North American chickadee with a chestnut back; cap and bib are sooty brown rather than black. The range is a narrow strip from southeastern Alaska to the coast of central California, and it stays there all year.
Voice
The call is a quick, scraping chick-a-dee-dee, higher and hoarser than that of Black-capped Chickadee, with the dee notes packed closer together. Thin, high tsee-tsee notes keep the members of a foraging flock in contact in the canopy. A whistled territorial song like the fee-bee of Black-capped Chickadee is absent in this species. A female disturbed in the nest cavity hisses and lunges forward with a jerking movement.
Recording: Greg Irving — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Upper Fish Hatchery Road, Sequim, Clallam County, Washington, United States · xeno-canto
Identification
A small, short-billed chickadee with a large head. The cap extends onto the nape and is dark sooty brown, not black; the white cheek stands out sharply against it. The bib is blackish brown and small. Back, scapulars and rump are bright chestnut — the mark that identifies the species at a glance. The flanks are chestnut too in birds from Alaska to northwestern California, but grey in the forms of the central and southwestern Californian coast (neglectus and barlowi). Wings and tail are grey with pale feather edges, the belly white.
Confusion species
No other chickadee in the region has a chestnut back. Boreal Chickadee also has a brown cap, but a dull greyish-brown back without chestnut, and the two species hardly ever occur together. Mountain Chickadee, which lives at higher elevations in California and the Cascades, has a white eyebrow through the black cap and is otherwise grey. Black-capped Chickadee has a glossy black cap, a grey back and buff flanks; in grey-flanked Chestnut-backed Chickadees of central California the chestnut back remains the deciding mark. In silhouette the species is shorter-tailed than Black-capped Chickadee.
Habitat
Damp, dense conifer forest at low elevation, with Douglas-fir, western hemlock, western redcedar, Sitka spruce and, in the south, coast redwood. The species keeps to the cool, foggy coastal climate and pushes inland only along humid valleys. It also breeds in suburbs and town parks with mature conifers, among them the San Francisco Bay area. It nests in a cavity in dead wood, usually an old woodpecker hole or one it excavates itself in rotten wood; the female builds a pad of moss and strips of bark and covers the eggs with a plug of fur.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Resident from Prince William Sound and southeastern Alaska south along the coast of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon to the central Californian coast, with the southern limit near Santa Barbara. Inland there is a separate population in northern Idaho, northeastern Washington and the far northwest of Montana. There is no migration in the ordinary sense, though birds shift from higher to lower slopes in winter. During the twentieth century the species spread southward in California and into planted residential areas.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Look for it in winter in mixed foraging flocks with kinglets, nuthatches and Brown Creeper; the hoarse, rapid call gives the flock away before you see the birds. In forest it is often high in the Douglas-firs, in gardens low in the shrubs. Do not go by flank colour, which changes from north to south, but by the back.
Conservation
Partners in Flight puts the breeding population at about 9.7 million birds, nearly two-thirds of them in the United States and a good third in Canada. Breeding Bird Survey counts show a decline of roughly 56 per cent between 1966 and 2015, while the species was at the same time occupying new suburban ground. The pressure lies in forest management: without standing dead wood and dead limbs there are no nest cavities. Its Red List status is Least Concern (LC).
Scientific name
Poecile rufescens | (Townsend, 1837)
John Kirk Townsend described the species in 1837 as Parus rufescens; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Poecile was introduced in 1829 by Johann Jakob Kaup, from Greek poikilos 'pied, dappled'. The species name rufescens is Latin for 'turning reddish', after the chestnut back. The material described came from the forests along the Columbia River, probably near Fort Vancouver, Washington.