Why Carolina Chickadee?

         Ever wonder how birds got their common names?
         No?
         Well I do. So sit down, shut up and take this lesson … and like it.
         Now by common names, I mean Field Sparrow, as opposed to the Latin name Spizella pusilla, which the ornithologist types like to toss around to make us think they know something.
      I’ll discuss birds most of us see at our feeders each day.
       Some birds are named by appearance or color. Cardinal – that’s obvious.  Then there’s Red-winged Blackbird, Blue Jay and so on. Grosbeaks have big thick bills. Then there are habits and habitats. House Sparrows and House Finches like to live around structures. It is not unusual to find one of their nests in a hanging plant on your porch. Some birds are named for the calls or sounds they make. Take the Mourning Dove – that’s a kind of sad song, right? And listen to a chickadee sometime – “chicka-dee-dee-dee.”
      But there’s a Black-capped Chickadee that most of you see up north. Then there’s a Carolina Chickadee, which looks much like the Black-capped, but lives down south. Why Carolina? Why not Florida Chickadee or Southern Chickadee?
      First of all, many American species were named for – or by - early naturalists. You have the western birds, Lewis’s Woodpecker and Clark’s Nutcracker, named for – you guessed it – the early American explorers.
      Back in the 1830s, our boy John James Audubon hung out with a preacher named John Bachman (Bachman’s Sparrow) from Charleston, S.C.  Now this was back before lenses and photography had been refined enough to capture images like we can today. How did Audubon get all of those detailed images on paper? I mean it’s not like he could get them to pose. So the best way for Audubon to get a good close look at birds was to shoot them and bring them back home for study – and painting. He’d often skin the birds and stuff them, then pin them on a board for his paintings. Sounds brutal, but this was a time before Americans had little notion of conservation or preservation because of the sheer abundance of most species. I referred to this in a previous post about the sad story of the Passenger Pigeon.
      Audubon and Bachman would go out with their trusty shotguns and, when they saw or heard a species of interest, they’d shoot them. Some years earlier Audubon had painted an image of a chickadee he had killed in one of his Louisiana expeditions. He named it a Black-cap Titmouse (titmice and chickadees are from the same family – Paridae. Don’t ask) and sent it up for his Birds of America publication. But while he was in South Carolina, he and Bachman were talking about chickadees one day when Bachman noted how big Black-capped Chickadees were up north. Audubon recalled being shown a specimen from the north that was also particularly large. So Audubon sent for some specimens from buddies up in Boston and Baltimore. In the meantime he and Bachman when out chickadee hunting.
     When they got the specimens together, they discovered that they were two different birds. Just in time, too, because Birds of America was about to go to press, and Audubon had to send word to England to get his Louisiana bird’s name changed. It appeared as “The Lesser black-headed Titmouse: Parus Caroliniensis,” which we now know as the Carolina Chickadee.  The important thing is that Audubon and Bachman were the first to differentiate the two species, and the name Carolina Chickadee evolved from the place where the species was first officially ID’d. The Carolina Wren naming was a similar story.
     In case you’re wondering, I got most of this stuff from a book called Had I the Wings: The Friendship of Bachman and Audubon, by Jay Shuler.  It offers lots of interesting facts about how Audubon went about his work and things he saw that we will never see. There are six species in Birds of America that are now extinct.
      You see the names of Audubon, Bachman, Wilson, Harris and others, tagged to bird names in your bird guide because these were the pioneers of ornithology in the U.S. They were the ones who first discovered and named species that Europeans had never seen.
      Here endeth the lesson.
       I ran out of my regular bird seed, so here are the species who took interest in the suet, leftover rice, apple slices, bread and peanut butter I offered today:

(PM, sunny, 45 degrees, 20 minutes)

Northern Cardinal
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Blue Jay

The Sons of Anarchy move in

A flock of Red-winged Blackbirds dropped in on the feeding station the other day and sparked a turf war with the Mourning Doves.

   That’s how I think of things with the birds in my backyard – one big battle over turf. Just like gangs in our streets.
   You have the blackbird gangs – the starlings, grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds. They’re like motorcycle gangs; every now and then they swoop in, take what they want, then move on. The Red-winged Blackbirds soon came an agreement with the doves the other day. The doves took the ground territory while the blackbirds took over the tube feeder. So Sons of Anarchy.
   But the Mourning Dove gang pretty much owns this block. They’re like The Sopranos. They have the numbers and muscle control things. And they like to hang out under the feeders, like Tony’s crew did at the restaurant.
   Then there is the cardinal gang. They’re more like the traditional Mafia network. They’re snappy dressers who flit in and own whatever feeder they like as long as they’re around.
   The Blue Jay crew is a raucous bunch that try to scare everyone around. But they’re more like the Reservoir Dogs crew – robbers who storm in when their favorite fare – peanuts - are in for the taking. They pick out these jewels and take off.
    Then you have the phony mayor. That would be the mockingbird. He tries to act like he has control over the whole domain, but everyone knows he’s helpless against the gangs.
   Caught in between all of this gang stuff are the honest, hard-working smaller birds, the chickadees, titmice, wrens and sparrows. They just scratch out a living, coming and going, getting what they can until the bigger gang birds show up.
   The woodpeckers mind their own business. The juncos and finches are like tourists passing through and watching their backs the whole way.
   Then, of course, there are the cops – the hawks. They spy on the scene and wait until just the right time to move in. Everyone scatters when 5-0 shows up, and pity the poor soul who is too slow to escape.
    That’s my backyard street scene. Not much bloodshed, because everyone knows his place. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining series of episodes I don’t want to miss.

Here’s the lineup from today:

(PM, 75 degrees, partly cloudy, 30 minutes)

Carolina Wren
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
White-throated Sparrow
Brown-headed Nuthatch
White-breasted Nuthatch
Red-bellied Woodpecker
American Goldfinch
Blue Jay