Mountain Chickadee
Blair Bernson/Macaulay Library
Get to Know Both Chickadee Sounds
Chickadees are very vocal birds. They sing two distinct vocalizations—so different that many people think they come from different species. There’s the chick-a-dee-dee-dee sound and the fee-bee song. The fee-bee song is tricky to hear in the soundscape, but we’ve provided you with an isolated version here to learn from before you try to listen for it in context.
As Found in the Field
In the following video, you’ll encounter a Mountain Chickadee making its chick-a-dee-dee-dee sound—and multitasking with food in its beak, too!
How to Talk About It
Chick-a-dee-dee-dee
Fee-bee
Learn the Sound Pattern
Here’s the fee-bee song of the Mountain Chickadee.
Justin M Hite/Macaulay LibrarySong Spotlight
Now listen for the Mountain Chickadee. This is great practice for tuning into the less-obvious bird sounds in the field. Which variation do you hear?
The Mountain Chickadee can be seen in the evergreen forests of the western mountains.
They vocalize often as they move about the trees eating insects or plucking seeds from cones. This species sings a sweet whistled song, “fee-bee” with the second note lower than the first.
Mountain Chickadees will occasionally sing more than one “fee” and more than one “bee.” They also make the “chicka-dee-dee” call, though you don’t hear it in this soundscape.
They overlap with several other species of chickadee, but they sound more hoarse and huskier than the
others.
When we look at the chickadee’s song in the spectrogram, we can see that the second note is lower in
pitch than the first. End of transcript
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