Boreal Birds

The Gunflint Trail is a great place for bird watching.  We started feeding the winter birds as soon as the snow began to fly.  We have to fill our sunflower seed feeder almost daily to keep up with the large number of birds.  The black-capped chickadees especially love the seeds and will eat us out of house and home if we let them.  We love to listen to their call, "chicka dee, dee, dee."  I read recently the number of  "dee’s" at the end of their call is used to communicate with other chickadees.  The more dee’s the higher the risk of a predator.  They also said that the variations in its call can also let other birds know the type of predator.  The next time I’m listening to chickadees I will be looking around and counting the number of dees, you learn something new every day.