Chickadees set up housekeeping in the backyard

(Courtesy Photo by Michelle N-McDaniel Soper)
The city of Ogden has zoned my lot for one single-family home. So when a set of prospective parents moved into another house on my property and even started renovating, I thought I'd be in trouble. The worst part of this lawlessness: I'm the one who provided the house for them.

The new tenants are a pair of Black-capped Chickadees, favorites among everyone who appreciates wildlife. These birds are small and cute and hyperactive, energetically calling "chick-a-dee-dee-dee!" as they extract single sunflower seeds from the feeder or hang upside down on sticky tree buds to look for insects.

Chickadees are inquisitive and explore without ceasing. Camouflaged hunters sitting quietly in tree stands have reported small bands of chickadees investigating them. Backyard birders know that fearless chickadees are often the first species to find a new feeder in the yard.

So I was optimistic when I bought a chickadee nest box from the Wild Bird Center in Layton. I placed the box in an aspen by the kitchen window about 8 feet above the ground. My accommodating son climbed the tree to ladle handfuls of fine wood chips into the box. It was like posting a vacancy sign.

We waited a mere seven days for tenants. On Saturday, April 26, two chickadees, as excited as a human couple after buying their first house, took turns removing woodchips from the box. They were excavating their new home.

In natural situations, chickadees find small, dead trees in shady locations and excavate their own nest cavities. I didn't believe these birds could excavate until I saw it myself at Willard Bay State Park a couple years ago. After all, chickadees don't have the chisel-like bills of woodpeckers or nuthatches. Their minute black bills seem better designed for gleaning insect prey from tiny crevasses. But the Willard Bay pair worked feverishly to make a cavity suitable for nesting.

My new tenants did the same thing. One mate barely waited for the other to exit with a load of chips before flying inside to do the same. Removing the chips made the chickadees feel like they were excavating a natural cavity. Call it the placebo effect.

The pair emptied their new house for two days. My husband and I could also hear tapping from inside their house as we watched from inside ours. The sound caused John to inquire, "How many chips could a chickadee chip if a chickadee could chip chips?"

We never counted. But we sure did see lots of chips falling like snow flurries when the birds left the house and opened their beaks.

The female began to build the nest on day three, carrying clumps of green moss from a shady spot in my neighbor's lawn. The male chickadee supervised; nest building is not one of his instinctive skills.

The landlord (me) provided animal hair for nest lining from the Layton Petco's grooming shop on day four. An obliging dog groomer reached into her vacuum cleaner and pulled out enough dog hair to re-fur about four old English sheepdogs, then bagged it for me. I've never been so happy to see a hairball. All that hair would satisfy the nest-lining needs of one .4-ounce prospective mother bird.

I laced the purple leaf sand cherry shrubs near the nest box with the hair and within 10 minutes, a female American Goldfinch was pulling at a clump. Thirty seconds later, the female chickadee left the nest box and harvested her first beakful of dog hair from the hybrid sand cherry/dog hair shrub.

Producing that hybrid shrub may be my biggest gardening success. The goldfinches have continued to harvest hair and the female House Finches have joined in the hair pulling. After many trips between the shrub and the nest box, the chickadee's pace has finally slowed.

Now, we wait. We may see the pair mating in the yard in preparation for the female laying six to eight eggs. The short incubation period of less than two weeks will be a quiet time, followed by frenetic parental activity as the pair tries to keep their demanding brood filled with high-protein insects gleaned from the foliage around the yard.

I'm so pleased with my quick success at transforming our single-family lot into a two-family lot that I'm sharing the story of the chickadees as a how-to. I just hope the city won't bust my fellow lot-mates and me for our flagrant violation of zoning laws. Shhhh ... don't tell!

Kristin Purdy can be reached at gobirding@comcast.net.