Black-capped Chickadees are fun to watch and listen to in their own right, and important for birders to pay attention to because their sociable feeding flocks so often associate with migrating warblers and vireos. Beyond birding, Black-capped Chickadees make ideal research subjects for both field and laboratory biologists, giving us insight into not only such obvious issues as how they survive frigid nights in the far north and how their hierarchical flocks are structured but also how they replace brain neurons every year, allowing them to forget obsolete memories (such as all their food caches in a birch tree after it topples in an ice storm) in order to store new memories in fresh neurons. Laura will follow chickadees through a year, touching on winter survival, how their social structure changes during the nesting season, how pairs raise young, and how they prepare for a whole new winter. She'll also include some interesting comparison information about Chestnut-backed Chickadees. 

This session will be conducted on Zoom. Please register to receive the Zoom meeting login details.

Laura Erickson is the author of 13 books about birds, including the American Birding Association's Field Guide to the Birds of Minnesota, National Geographic's Pocket Guide to Birds of North America, 101 Ways to Help Birds, and her brand new 100 Plants to Feed the Birds.

Her radio program and podcast, "For the Birds,"  has aired on many community and public radio stations since 1986. She is the recipient of the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology’s Golden Passenger Pigeon Award (2022), the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union’s Thomas Sadler Roberts Memorial Award (2020), and the American Birding Association’s Roger Tory Peterson Award (2014). She's been following chickadee research since she started birding in 1975. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Chickadee photograph by Mick Thompson