The Chickadees I Feed Are Adept at Speaking Out When Their Flock Is Threatened
By Trish O’Kane June 30, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
On a piercingly bright 13-degree morning this spring, I grab some bird seed and drive to Woodside. I seek the counsel of the feathered.
This scruffy, 340-acre strip of wetland, sandplain, and floodplain forest is one of my favorite birding haunts in Vermont, sandwiched between a busy highway and the Winooski River. Near a medical complex and a giant Lowes, most drivers racing by at 50 mph do not even notice it. But long-distance migratory birds following watery highways north, some flying thousands of miles from South America and the Caribbean, certainly do. This wet green ribbon of refuge in the middle of concrete is an ideal avian gas station. The river and its banks offer plenty of the insect protein marathon fliers urgently need after losing up to 20% of their muscle mass on their way to nesting grounds in Vermont’s mountains or Canada’s boreal forests. That’s why diligent birders have discovered 189 bird species here, including hundreds of crows who play and forage in a giant compost pile, a corvid daycare center.
I started birding years ago, after a major midlife crisis. Now our entire country is in a major midlife crisis, just one year before we celebrate our 250th anniversary as a democracy. I don’t know what advice my feathered friends have about confronting a wannabe orange-crested dictator-king or his functionary, JD Vance, who we chased out of our little state only this week. But I do know that they have never, ever let me down.
In my life before birds, I was a human rights investigative reporter in Central America, covering weak and teetering democracies emerging from U.S.-backed dictatorships. I lived in Guatemala for six years, and reported on one of the worst massacres in recorded North American history, during which the U.S.-trained Guatemalan military slaughtered a village of over 300 souls. I know how dictatorships take residence in your body and how fear changes your daily behavior. How people lower their voices and glance around before they mention certain names. How every SUV with tinted windows and no license plate that slowly passes by starts your heart on a wild race.
Since Trump was elected, my reporter brain keeps telling me that he is just throwing a lot of executive-order bullshit spaghetti against the wall—mostly illegal—and that our courts will hold. This is not Guatemala, where judges got daily death threats, left the country, or just took the bribe, and where death squad vans cruised city streets. But with every horrific headline, my Guatemala brain powers on, and I wake up in terror. Time to feed the birds, and my soul.
It is cold, quiet, and snowy at Woodside. I am the only human here. During COVID, some anonymous St. Francis-type spent dozens of hours in the bitter cold, mittened palms filled with sunflower and safflower seeds, to entice the birds to feed from their hands. So now there is usually a hungry flock waiting near the gate. I fill my gloved right hand with seed and stand still as a statue.
Five minutes later, the first bird lands, a chickadee plumper, larger, and more full of himself than his buddies watching from surrounding bushes. He cocks his head, stares at me for one or two heart-stopping seconds, then grabs that first sunflower seed. Up he zips into a small tree to pound his seed against the trunk until he cracks it open.
Every first protester is like First Chickadee, that sassy bold one who makes that first landing as all the other birds watch very closely and weigh the risks of joining in.
After another five minutes, a few chickadees who have been carefully observing First Chickadee begin hovering around my head like gigantic mosquitoes. They do not land. Others observe from nearby branches as First Chickadee shuttles back and forth between my palm and his seed-pounding trunk, an operation he continues solo until finally another chickadee flies straight at me, nearly skimming my palm. She dips to land, then changes her mind mid-air and races back to her tree, as her audience makes squeaky chortles.
When a second chickadee does land, he does not grab a seed. Instead, he spends several seconds methodically shoveling them out of my palm with his tiny beak, dumping the seeds onto the snow. Several chickadees watching from the bushes then dive at my boots to feast. Is the seed-dumper trying to help his buddies who are too scared to land on my palm, what biologists call “altruism”? Or is he just a messy eater?
A distracted chickadee is a dead chickadee. Their collective defense system depends on watching and listening to each other with a laser-like focus. It takes another 20 minutes of careful observation for the other chickadees to decide I am “safe.” Three land on my palm at the same time. One opens her beak a fraction and emits a silent chickadee curse, sending the other two skedaddling. A fourth perches on my sleeve, waiting. There are chickadees who only want peanuts, chickadees who only pluck sunflower seeds, and chickadees who prefer shell-less safflower seeds. A lone chickadee chooses a single-shelled pumpkin seed, a culinary avian-adventurer. As my ornithology brain catalogues the variations in behavior, my soul delights in the trusting clutch of tiny talons on my Smartwool mitten.
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Unfortunately, at 13 degrees with a north wind, my feet are quickly becoming blocks of ice. I can stand like St. Francis of the Frozen Tundra no longer. The 40 minutes I’ve lasted is not long enough for the other avian species to summon their courage and brave the perils of my palm. But the semi-circle of branches above is bustling with them, titmice and nuthatches and downy woodpeckers all watching the handfeeding show from their balcony seats, as if I am standing on a stage below.
When chickadees detect a threat, their alarm calls activate an avian rapid-relay system that warns over 50 different bird species in the vicinity of any imminent threat before it can reach them. These avians must know by now that I am safe. But they do not approach. They just watch as the chickadee circus grows louder and rowdier with a chickadee buzzing by my right ear like a large bee, others flapping around my face, so close, they could land on my nose.
I close my eyes and enjoy one last tiny rush of frigid air against my cheek as they careen past, stare at me, grab a seed, and zoom back to their safe perch. But I am disappointed. There have been no aha-avian wisdom moments, no insights on how to drive away an orange-crested wannabe dictator-predator. And none of the other bird species came to my outstretched hands. Then I think back to every time I’ve hand-fed birds over the past decade: The first bird to take that risk has always been a chickadee. They are intrepid. Their curiosity overcomes their fear of a predator. They are the first avian to inquire: What in the hell is going on?
As I leave Woodside, I realize something: We are the chickadees. The Vermonters standing alongside me in the cold for hours to chase Vance away. The intrepid citizens who just started 50501, Indivisible, and the Tesla Takedown. And soon we will be joined by many more, like the people in Los Angeles, San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York who are trying to stop ICE from dragging away members of our flock.
It’s scary to protest your first time. We usually only hear about protests that face violent repression, or that turn destructive—seldom about daily acts of courage, some as simple as a single person standing on a street corner with a sign. But every first protester is like First Chickadee, that sassy bold one who makes that first landing as all the other birds watch very closely and weigh the risks of joining in. And the seed that First Chickadee grasps is one of solidarity, comradeship, hope, and joy.
Trish O’Kane is the author of Birding to Change the World: A Memoir. She teaches at the University of Vermont.
