The chickadees came back today. With a pair of binoculars I was watching the buffalo that had just appeared at the river and something kept fluttering through my line of sight. It was a band of chickadees and I wondered if it could be the same band that had vacated our island of cottonwoods in September.
Three weeks ago the white crowned sparrows showed up and a week before that I saw the first, winter goldfinch sitting at the bird feeder as if he’d never left. But the finches and the sparrows and the chickadees had left – at different times during the fall – and now they are back. It is good to see each species but the chickadee is special. For me, it is a Christmas bird that flits along the tree branches suddenly – just when you think that the windows are no longer portals to joy and surprise. They are tenacious little puffs of silver-grey that do not hesitate to grapple with those larger white crowns and goldfinches that have beat them back to the feeders overlooking the Cheyenne River.
My Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior says that the chickadees do not migrate back and forth to my feeders. Their appearances and disappearances are termed “irruptions or invasions”. It doesn’t matter to me if they are migrating, irrupting or invading, watching chickadees is a boost to winter moral, a gift to get us all through winter. The shortest day of the year is only days away. The nights are freakishly long and the sun has no time to warm things before it begins to crash into the ominous blue of the distant Black Hills. Maybe it’s those long nights that make the chickadees come home.
In fact, I am not even sure if they are coming home or if our prairie oasis of cottonwood trees and ever-trickling water is only a winter spa for chickadees. We catch glimpses of the tiny, frenetic, black capped birds in the summer but have no way of knowing if they are the same ones that show up about the time of the winter solstice. They are not fast fliers and seem to depend on the cover of trees to keep them safe from coopers, and sharp-shinned hawks. How do such tiny, vulnerable birds traverse the many miles of treeless grasslands to get to our sheltering cottonwoods?
As with most occurrences beyond our windows, it is difficult to figure out what is really happening. But a couple things are certain, chickadees vanish for months at a time and I am transfixed as I wonder how they move and where it is that they go. There is something about unfettered movement that is fantastic and a hallmark of wildness. It is hard to imagine that a chickadee, weighing no more than an ounce or two, could have anything in common with a 1500 pound buffalo but they share a mastery of that unfettered movement that fascinates me so. Where do they go, how do they slip away and return so easily?
Six weeks ago we pushed hundreds of buffalo to the east side of the Cheyenne River where they have access to thirty square miles of deep gullies and high grassy benches. A gravel road touches that winter pasture in just one place and pretty much dead ends. Off road traffic is not allowed. Our house has perhaps the best view possible of that pasture but still we can see only a tiny fraction of the land area. When those hundreds of buffalo hit the far side of the river they are like so many chickadees cast to the prairie wind. Occasionally we catch sight of a few, or a family group, or sometimes the whole herd. But for days and sometimes weeks of winter, the hills beyond the river are as void of buffalo as are our cottonwood branches of chickadees in the spring and fall.
Where do they go? Sometimes I dream of chickadees lined up in a row along the limbs of trees I can not identify. Are they willows along a nearby water course or nitrogen breathing trees on Neptune? I will never know. And I may never know where the buffalo go either. I have seen buffalo shapes on distant hills that could as easily have been a field of yuccas. I have found their tracks that lead to edge of a cliff and fade to nothing. Was their trail carried away with the wind or is there another, more mystical explanation?
As humans, we seem programmed to understand only what we can see and what we can control. It is as if whatever is invisible is also nonexistent. But like the chickadees, the buffalo come back. For the last six years they have begun to let themselves be seen regularly in early March and by April first, they are standing at the river, ready to be let back into their summer pasture. They are seldom seen from November to March but I know they are out there just like they have been for 10,000 years. Maybe they are grazing the same high, lonesome benches that they have grazed at this time of year for all those centuries. Maybe they are laid up at the lip of a hill, in solemn rows, covered with snow, just out of the wind like so many sharptailed grouse. When we do see them in December, stringing down out of the hill to the river, it is as if they are bringing us a Christmas gift.
Watching, I wonder – could a chickadee ride on the back of a buffalo? Could they snuggle down in the warm, safe, wiry fur and hitch a ride to within sight of the bird feeders where they like to spend Christmas? Could they share a secret with the buffalo that is not explained in the pages of Sibley’s Guide to Bird Life and Behavior?
Comments 13
If I was a chickadee that’s what I’d do, it’s cold out there in the winter!
Happy Holidays everyone!
Oh, I hope they do, Dan. Here we have a Carolina Chickadee which is smaller than yours (and the ones I used to see at the feeder in Michigan). They, too, seem to disappear for a while and then return around Thanksgiving. They are sharing the feeder now with a nice little downy woodpecker.
I bet those chickadees do ride, & also share mucho with the buffalo! As Albert Einstein once said–“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” I hope this finds all of you this Holiday Season in Health, Happiness, & Harmony!! BE SAFE!!
Thank you for the pleasure of your writing. I look forward to it and enjoy reading it out loud to my husband. Keep it coming!
Your story weaves Beautifull pictures in my mind…I love Chickadees and their cute little dee dee dee call and the white Buffalo is one of my four totems , Thank You for the wonderfull writings *Wakan Tanka Kici Un* May the Great Spirt Bless You !!!
Dan, my wife Linda has chickadees pegged, always observing ” they have an attitude” as they bump a Downy or a Hairy from one of our feeders.
Christmas blessings to you all, Walter
On this hill where I live in western New Jersey, the chickadees, purple finches and cardinals are at my bird feeder every day of the year, so I guess it is Christmas every day at my house. The purple finches are bullies, so the cardinals and chickadees wait patiently until the purple finches leave. Don’t worry, birdies – I’ll keep that feeder filled with sunflower seeds and other goodies for you!
Fascinating, Dan. Thank you for seeing what our focus and intention ignore. Then you let our imagination peek, too. It is the secrets that harbor life. Alan
Even in Florida we have many periods during the year that we do not see our little chickadee friends, but all of a sudden they will come back,. chiding me heartily if the feeders are not full to their liking! Some get so used to me in the yard, they will stand on my shoulder or hat as I take the feeders down to refill them!
Dan, This is the rugged rock-picker of the plains, This was one of your best musings ever!! I was just admiring those little fella’s from our kitchen window here in Sioux Falls. As always, your writing helps bring me back to your ranch in my mind, and that sustains me until my next visit. Tell my good friend Erney that I am recovering from yet another surgery, but I will be out to see you all and hunt the elusive Fairburn’s with Erney next spring!! Blessings to you all, Jim and Vickly Peacock
Dan, I have loved what you write ever since I read Buffalo for the Lonely Heart. We have a bird feeder that we watch out our kitchen window. Visitors are red birds (Mr. & Mrs.);A wood pecker that throws all the food on the ground; and other little birds that love to eat the food the wood peckers throws around; occasionaly some doves visit, with their lookout up on one of the neighbors roof or in a tree close by. For some reason I always think of our daughter (deceased) when I see the doves. Don’t know why – except they are so quiet, like she was. Keep up the good writing!!
I read this again today. Your chickadees may come by here… we get them for short spurts, but before Christmas, usually. So maybe they just take a quick jaunt to Colorado each year. We haven’t had any glimpses of buffalo here, though, so maybe they don’t travel together out this way. I agree that the chickadees are special and festive. They have no trouble displacing the possibly 300 sparrows of different variety that we feed regularly at our feeders. Each day, a small hawk of some kind swoops through for a meal and we realize we are servicing part of the food chain. No pile of chickadee feathers has yet to appear under our hedge, though. Maybe I’ll tie a message to a chickadee leg for you one of these days.
They are passing through our area, Gig Harbor, WA. now but not for long.