Mountain Chickadee
Poecile gambeli · Tits, Chickadees, and Titmice
Banding codeMOCH
Keys to identifying it
1Size & shape
About 5.3 in long.
2Color pattern
- Black cap broken by a white eyebrow
- Black bib, white cheeks
- Gray sides
3Habitat & season
Mountain conifers; lower canyons and yards in winter
In northern Utah: year-round.
Seen most often in August, September and October.
Share of the region’s research-grade iNaturalist bird observations each month, scaled to this bird’s peak. Highlighted bars are its peak months.
4Voice
Three descending whistles; a hoarse version of the chickadee call.
“cheese-bur-ger”
National Park Service by Rocky Mountain National Park · Public domain
Know it
- The white eyebrow separates it from the Black-capped Chickadee.
- Its song is often remembered as 'cheese-bur-ger.'
- Birds from harsher high elevations have shown better spatial memory for finding cached seeds.
Often confused with
Black-capped Chickadee
House Sparrow
Red-breasted Nuthatch- White-breasted Nuthatch
From iNaturalist identification data for northern Utah.
From Wikipedia
The mountain chickadee is a small songbird, a passerine bird in the tit family Paridae.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0