Date: 11/6/24 6:49 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: Re: [VTBIRD] 06 November 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
The more the *dees*, the more annoyed or nervous the chickadee. You may get
one or two, but the sitting owl receives an explosion of *dees*.
On Wed, Nov 6, 2024 at 9:29 AM Charlie Teske <cteske140...>
wrote:
> Do you know what chick-a-dee dee dee means? Every day when I fill the
> feeder the nearest chickadee repeats that song. I wonder if it is a thank
> you or a what took you so long, or just a dinner is served notice to his
> chums?
>
>
>
> On Wed, 6 Nov 2024 08:42:58 -0500, Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...>
> wrote:
>
> 6:17 a.m. The Day After. Fifty-four degrees, wind South 6 miles per hour,
> gusting to 16. Diaphanous mist under a big, textured sky, colors soft and
> painterly. Across the east, reaching into the north, high pastel pink
> clouds grade to orange—stationary as the hills below. Low, mostly dull gray
> clouds scud north at a slow but steady clip. In anticipation of the sun,g
> small, oblong clouds above Hurricane Hill glow. Pink becomes orange,
> becomes luminous silver. Then, the sun ... a cradle of hope, appears—like
> it always has—four-and-a-half billion years and counting. A high
> contemplative crow, silent as stone, heads north, brushed by daylight.
> Another heads west, complaining all the way. Thirteen species of birds,
> including red-tailed hawk, mourning dove, American robin, red- and
> white-breasted nuthatches, blue jay, golden-crowned kinglet, tufted
> titmouse, black-capped chickadee, northern cardinal, dark-eyed junco, and
> American goldfinch.
>
> Chickadees: scatter hoarders, scattering and hoarding. Feathered Einsteins.
> Joyfully, chickadees hide thousands of sunflower seeds in front-yard lilac,
> crabapple, and the twigs of brooding maples. Behind flaps of bark and
> inside tufts of evergreen needles. Back and forth, feeder to trees. One
> seed at a time. Despite weighing less than a playing card, chickadee has a
> brilliant memory. To find the seeds later in winter, tiny brains swell and
> become storage vessels for vast information. Deep inside the brain, the
> hippocampus recalls the location of 80,000 seeds—a memory built at the
> expense of spiders. Every May, adult chickadees gather spiders from the
> eaves of my house and garage. Spiders provide chicks with *taurine, *the
> essential nutrient that promotes healthy brain development. The result ...
> phenomenal memory.
>
> On a dark day, find an industrious chickadee. That they're cheerful,
> animated, beneficial, gregarious, tolerant, and cute helps, too.
>
>
