Chickadee

My father's friend Charlie used to call these birds pitchypees, a name I like at least as much as chickadee. Charlie told me it was the name the old fellas used to use when he was a boy in the 1920s. Either way, the name is onomatopoeic: one of their calls is much like it.

Here at our house we don't see the boreal chickadee, but a kilometer away, on the hillside, they are common. Instead we get these dapper fellows, black-capped chickadees.