Over the past couple-three weeks, I have observed chickadees eating some part of the bud of the Oregon white oak. Sometimes it breaks off the bud, takes it to a nearby branch, dissects it and appears to eat part of the bud. Other times it will just hang on the branch, open the bud and eat. It all happens with typical chickadee exuberance, so it doesn’t take them long to get at the little morsel of food they are seeking. I saw them yesterday, for the first time, doing the same thing to the cottonwood trees along the river.
In The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior, he had this to say about the Paridae family to which chickadees belong: “Members of the Paridae share several diagnostic feeding behaviors. Specialized leg muscles enable these birds to feed acrobatically (they often feed while hanging upside down), making them particularly adept at exploiting resources in difficult locations, such as buds at the ends of twigs.”
