Beady black eyes on a striped, tilted head blink up at me, and then back to my tasty gifts. Tiny claws delicately grip the tips of my fingers as the little mountain chickadee sorts through the pile of peanuts in my palm. One shoots out of her beak and falls to the snow-covered ground; the small gray and black bird watches it go, then turns back to the rest. She carefully selects the largest nut and darts off to her favorite pine tree to cache her treasure.
It’s a journey this half-ounce bird will make many times today. Flutter to the aspen closest to me, where I’m chopping wood or fixing the electric fence, call for my attention, and wait for the bounty. Or she’ll fly to the elk head mounted on my deck, perching on an antler tine to politely peep at me while I drink my morning tea and survey the new tracks in the snow. Each time, I dig into a pocket and pull out a handful of peanuts. Sometimes I’m on a ladder, or in the middle of a project when my partner will turn to ask what is taking so long. And there I am, arm outstretched, chickadee mid-flight; both of us caught in the act. I often wonder who trained whom, in this cross-species relationship.
She plummets down from the canopy, dropping like a rock, only to pull up at the last second, gracefully clutching my outstretched finger. Mountain chickadees are a part of the order of passarines, a group of birds that have evolved especially to perch and grasp. A special tendon connected to her single rear toe goes taut as her knees bend, keeping her snug and secure on branches while she sleeps.
It’s snowing, of course. It’s almost always snowing on Togwotee Pass from November to May. I live in a yurt at 8,000 feet on a north-facing Wyoming slope east of Grand Teton National Park. It’s shockingly harsh, and I am impressed by my neighbors that will be overwintering with us, both waking and sleeping. Not humans, obviously. We have a pine marten that sometimes sneaks into the yurt to say hello; a little female who likes to rifle through the trash bins and steal meat off of elk we have hanging in the shed during hunting season. The resident grizzlies, a sow and a yearling cub, frequently amble along our driveway a respectful distance from the 7,000-volt electric fence, on their way to the latest gut pile left by hunters as they pack on a late season snack before bed.
A small mixed flock of mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches is my constant shadow; the chickadees are fearless, but the nuthatches only deign to visit my palm restaurant when I’ve forgotten to refill the feeders after the latest squirrel raid. Snowshoe hares leave tracks that crisscross the road, but rarely show their whiskers, which is probably wise around two archery hunters. The mule deer are ghosts that flicker between the aspen and pines, and I think of the pronghorn nursery in our valley bottom, long gone with their fawns as soon as the first flakes of snow dusted the peaks around us. So much of our life on the side of a mountain is transitional, and I am grateful for the constant companionship of my wild neighbors.
Tipi rings dot the hillside across the valley, and another one rests in a neighbor’s yard. I wonder what this place looked like to the Mountain Shoshone who once lived here. Did they ever stay over the winter? What did this valley look like before the cattle ranchers moved in, and the logging trucks thundered up and down the gravel roads? What did they call this place, before trappers and white folks subsumed the land? There is a hint of an old streambed wandering down the valley floor, but years of erosion has pushed the creek north at the old beaver pond, where it meanders to the next valley over on its journey to the Wind River. I wish the rocks would tell me their secrets, but the mysteries remain.
The mountain chickadee is a curious little thing, trading dominance in their mixed-species flocks for a larger hippocampus and better spatial cognition. This translates to an exceptional memory for a pea-sized brain. They return to the thousands of seed caches they make throughout the year. Black-capped chickadees, a sister species, abound in the valleys just below us, but they rarely grace our pine-filled home, preferring to make theirs in comparatively lush riparian ecosystems.
I wonder, after last year’s harsh fire season, if our local chickadees will become more abundant as they seek the security of filled feeders, or more scarce as they lose cover. I wonder if black-capped chickadees will enter the new space in the canopy created by fire and chainsaws, and push their smaller cousins into the remaining dense old growth that remains higher up the mountainside.
I wonder, after last year’s harsh fire season, if our local chickadees will become more abundant as they seek the security of filled feeders, or more scarce as they lose cover.
After all, the zone of cohabitation between these two chickadee species is expanding as humans change the landscape. Removing spruces to plant maples can mean the loss of an entire species locally. For the mountain chickadees, when we cleared trees in the face of a wildfire, I fear that in our efforts to save our home, we unwittingly destroyed theirs.
But chickadees are a hardy lot, and have been starting to hybridize more frequently as their two ranges overlap. I find myself studying each little passerine that comes to my hand, trying to see if I can spot the differences. Are those stern, slanting eyebrows a bit thin? Are their sides a little more brown than usual? It’s hard to tell, but these ponderings will take up weeks of winter.
I wonder at the tenacity of life, to refuse to break in the face of change, instead choosing to adapt, to hybridize and to live. I feel lucky to be watching evolution in action. These little birds are braver than I can imagine; I often wonder how it would feel to be that small and to fearlessly flit to the hand of a monster for a snack. But in this harsh winter world, it really is a matter of survival. Those enlarged hippocampi have identified me, quite correctly, as a very consistent source of food. What bravery, to eat from the hand of a giant.
