A fellow photographer informed me this past weekend that the little bird that I was preparing to photograph was not a Black-capped Chickadee—it was a Carolina Chickadee.
I am a neophyte when it comes to bird identification, but I confess to being confused. I have been trying to photograph this bird for months and have been calling it a Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) in my postings. To my eyes, it looked like the photographs I’ve seen others post of the Black-eyed Chickadee.
I turned to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, my favorite resource for bird identification, to try to resolved this conundrum. The site confirmed that the Black-capped Chickadee and the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) look a lot alike, but the two species probably diverged more than 250,000 years ago.
There are some differences between the two in the edging of the wings and the bib and the songs are different too, but apparently the range is one of the most critical factors, since the ranges of these two species don’t overlap much. I appear to be within the range of the Carolina Chickadee, but Virginia seems to be near the northernmost edge of the range, so I can’t exclude the possibility that I will run into a Black-capped Chickadee.
Here are a couple of my favorite chickadee photos. The first one was taken a couple of weeks ago with my recently acquired 135-400mm lens. It did a pretty good job in capturing some of the details of the chickadee in the tree. The second one was taken this past Monday with my 55-250mm lens. I managed to get a little closer to the chickadee that was clutching a stalk in the cattail field and was able to isolate the background a little.
I got started watching and photographing birds this past fall, probably after many birds had left the area. I can’t wait to see what new ones (for me) show up this spring.
Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
Hi, nice post! Made me realize the pictures I thought I had of Black Capped Chickadee could actually be Carolina Chickadee! Hope spring brings many “new” birds 😉
Thanks. It’s hard enough to identify common birds, but just when I start to feel a bit confident that I know some of the birds, I learn that there are others that look similar.
Isn’t it so interesting to learn about them? I am having fun here seeing “new” birds. Seemed to have lived around them for quite a while but started noticing them only now 🙂
Super capture!
Thank you for the info…
Welcome to my world-this happens with plants all the time! i’ve watched chickadees for a long time now and I can’t see any difference between the ones in your photos and the black capped.
Plants, animals, birds, and insects are all so hard to identify. Here is a link to one site that compares the two types of chickadees. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/AboutBirdsandFeeding/chickadeeIDtable.htm
Wow-when you see them side by side you can see that there really are a lot of differences. Thanks Mike.
Beautiful composition in your first shot Mike. Chickadees are among my favorites–always perky and inquisitive, and not too shy. At our cabin, if you stand still and stage-whisper “chick-a-dee-dee-dee,” they often will approach to within six feet or so in curiosity, sometimes even closer. It’s worth a try!
Thanks, Gary. I might try that, once I verify that nobody is around.(I am not easily embarrassed, but trying to call out chickadees might make me feel a little foolish.)
The community of bloggers who can share their information and their knowledge is what makes this process so special. Your photos where superb as always.
To me, they sound different, even the “fee-bee” call. But you are probably in an area of range overlap and there may even be hybrids, so you can just call it a chickadee and forget the species…
That would sure make thinks easier. I guess I need to pay a bit more attention to the call. There are a few I can identify, but I have focused most of my attention on the visual identification features.