Invariably chickadees are accompanied by titmice, nuthatches, a downy woodpecker or two, kinglets and warblers. In the winter, this is one of the most reliable ways of finding a yellow-rumped warbler. In fact, their insistent scolding has often led us to such predators. Chickadees are year-round residents over most of their range. If you don't see them at your feeders as often during the summer as you did during the winter, it's only because they are dinning on more natural food like insects and caterpillars.
Chickadees have an interesting social structure in their lives.
All is not quite as carefree as they would have you believe as they wing in and out from your feeders. However, at the end of the summer, a major social shift occurs. Older birds gradually come together with several of the newly fledged young to form flocks. They become floaters and must learn how to enter the system. Through careful monitoring of interactions between individual birds, Ms. Smith learned that both the regulars and the floaters had a clear-cut linear pecking order in each of the flocks and that most of the regulars were paired right from the start.