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Bird Sounds and Songs of the Black-capped Chickadee | The Old Farmer's Almanac

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Bird Sounds: Black-Capped Chickadee

The bold little chickadee is a welcome sight at any feeder.

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Photo by USFWS Mountain-Prairie via Wikimedia Commons
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Black-capped Chickadee Calls

The Editors
April 29, 2022
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Here you can identify the sounds and bird song of the black-capped chickadee. You may recognize their “chick-a-dee-dee-ee” or the whistled “fee-bee.”

  1. Listen first for the two-note whistle of the male black-capped chickadee. It’s a very clear two-note song that drops in pitch and sounds like “fee-bee.” Now you know that THAT sound is! The males begin singing in mid-January, and the song increases in frequency as winter progresses. Females also sing occasionally.
  2. Then, listen for the chickadee call which sounds like “chickadee-dee-dee.“  Interestingly, they will use an increasing numbers of dee notes when they are alarmed.

If you wish to attract the friendly chickadee, they will readily visit bird feeders and especially like sunflower seeds or suet in winter. You may see them take the food and fly away to store in a tree crevice for later.

Their diet is mostly seeds, insects, and berries. They can been seen hopping among branches and foraging for food, even flying out to catch insects mid-air.

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The bird sounds is complimentary, with permission from The Macaulay Library at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Click here to listen to the sounds of other birds!

Have you heard a Black-Capped Chickadee? Add your comments below. Be sure to let us know where you live or where you’ve heard this bird sound before!

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Comments

Lisa Parham (not verified)

2 weeks ago

I have heard this bird in our backyard in Dalton, GA.

Sharon R Ellsw… (not verified)

4 weeks 1 day ago

So happy to have identified this bird! I live in urban Salt Lake City, Utah, and I heard his two-note call for several minutes while I gardened last week, the end of April. He was sitting on the ridge line of my house. There was another chickadee responding somewhere in the neighborhood. Is this the female calling back? Or another male notifying the chickadee in my yard of his presence?

Jennifer L. Buxton (not verified)

1 month ago

I live in Littleton, Colorado. My daughters and I hear this bird all the time. I always told my younger daughter he was calling her name: Ca-ley, Caley, with a long "a". Caley died of breast cancer 2 years ago at 32. I told her I would ALWAYS think of her when I heard this bird☺

Abby jackowski (not verified)

1 month 3 weeks ago

I heard this bird at Elmwood golf course! Is it an invasive species?

No. The Black-capped Chickadee has nine recognized subspecies and occurs from Alaska through the southern half of Canada and south to roughly half of the lower 48 U.S. states.

Bobby D (not verified)

3 months 3 weeks ago

Well, it's February here in southern Illinois, and I have a great variety of birds at my feeders. Northern cardinals, tufted titmice (or is it titmouses? LOL), and the occasional woodpecker, lots of sparrows, finches of all types, and ah—the rarest of sparrows - every once in a while I get a Eurasian tree sparrow with it's black ear patch on its white cheek, over from St. Louis, Missouri, 100 miles away! Anyway, I'm used to all their calls, but for the past two afternoons, I've heard a call I didn't recognize. It was a mournful? call—and just two notes. Well, thanks to your website, I now know that it's one of those little black capped chickadees... calling out to his mate. How sweet! BUT, and there's always a but! The call is MUCH lower in pitch than any of the recordings I can find out there. Begs the question: do their voices change in pitch, perhaps as they age? I donno. But it's funny to listen to the same bird and find major variations, to pitch and song sometimes! For example, my Carolina wrens have a VERY different "teakettle" call here in Illinois than they do in recordings from other parts of the country! The notes go different ways! Almost like they speak a dialect, or something! That wouldn't surprise me, since humans do that all the time. I wonder if the birds can identify "foreigners" that way! Love those rascals, even if they do eat me out of house and home!

niya (not verified)

1 year 1 month ago

Heard the "fee-bee" call in British Columbia Canada

Lauren Hancock (not verified)

1 year 2 months ago

I've been in Groton CT for almost a couple years now and have heard this song so much. It's beautiful! I just couldn't figure out which bird it was coming from. Almost 2 years later and I finally googled the right thing and found that it was the Black capped chickadee.

Martha Federle (not verified)

1 year 6 months ago

When I lived in Swannanoa, NC my bird feeder was visited constantly by chickadees. I noticed that they would line up on a nearby tree branch and take their turn at the feeder. No line hopping! Such polite little beauties!