The black-capped chickadee is one of North America’s most common and widely distributed birds, found from coast to coast across much of Canada and the northern two-thirds of the United States. They don’t typically migrate, staying in their range year-round. As you would expect of a social animal, their vocal behavior is complex: adults have at least 16 different kinds of vocalizations.
How to listen
The compilation recording in the Macaulay Library strings together at least thirteen types of sounds, or what humans think of as syllables, from various birds recorded in 2020–2022 just north of Yellowstone National Park. The entries below are loosely ranked from most to least common. Each has a name (following Peterson’s guide wherever possible), a brief description, and where we have one, a recording; the Macaulay Library number (ML) points to a spectrogram playback of that sound.
The aim is first to help you tell the common sounds apart, and second to introduce some of their functions, or meanings, in real communicative events. Remember that what a chickadee hears, and therefore interprets, is not necessarily what we hear.
The chick-a-dee call
The classic chick-a-dee call is built from four syllables, labeled A, B and C (the “chick-a”) and D (the “dee”). They can be used separately or together, with or without every syllable, but always in that order. The call is learned and comes in many variations. A, B and C syllables vary a lot between birds, especially in frequency, duration and loudest frequency; since birds can discriminate as little as a 1% change in frequency, starting and ending frequency should let them tell A, B and C apart. The most common combinations are A-D and B-C-D.
D syllables, the most common, vary in length, spacing, loudness and pitch contour, and can be used on their own, perhaps encoding the caller’s identity. Social groups appear to have their own “signature” chick-a-dee call, and stronger research shows that population of origin shapes syntax and phonetics, something like a dialect. The number of distinct combinations grows with sample size, a trait human languages share, and as A, B or C syllables increase in a call, D syllables tend to decrease. Hunger, hormones, season, sex, feeding behavior, social context and how close a threat is may all shape the call. Other parids use similar and different syllables, but a similar-sounding syllable may function differently in another species.
Syllables, words or sentences
These sounds could be the equivalent of phonemes (sounds without meaning on their own), morphemes (sounds with meaning that never stand alone), words, phrases or whole sentences. We don’t always know. An English speaker can break “IMADEHERDUCK” into its meaningful parts even though it looks like one word, but current research suggests birds do not perceive sound sequences quite the way human brains do.
Playing these sounds back to wild birds and watching how they react lets us grasp the gist. Alarm calls are among the easiest for us to understand, yet changes in pitch, timing and loudness may carry more than “alarm,” such as who is calling. And the D note might be a homonym whose meaning shifts with context, like “meat” and “meet.” There is a lot left to learn, and much we may never understand.
Share your sounds
We are still looking for recordings of the high-low and snarl calls, and for any sound you think we have missed. Leave us a note in the sign-up form at the bottom of this page, and we will tell you how to send your audio or video.
Credits
Recordings made just north of Yellowstone National Park, with spectrograms in the Macaulay Library. With thanks to the researchers whose work informs these descriptions, including Todd Freeberg, the Sieving Lab, the Gall Lab and the Songbird Neuroethology Lab, and to Birds of the World, the Peterson Field Guide and eBird. Hero photo by Jeffrey Reed.