Ron Schara: Behold the cold chickadee

Love is being in the company of chickadees.

You probably already knew that.

Minnesota is an all-season home to the black-capped chickadee, a smidgen of a bird that defies Minnesota's coldest winters and meanest Aprils.

Although chickadees rarely attend the State Fair, the Great Minnesota Get-Together, the bird is even capable of bonding little old ladies in tennis shoes and unshaven deer hunters in longjohns.

At the sight of a chickadee, this diverse bunch will melt into a mutual admiration society for the bird's dapper dress and nonpartisan friendliness. It'll visit your bird feeder in the backyard or sit on your rifle barrel in the deer woods.

Chickadees aren't politically correct.

A nature writer, Tom Brown, once observed that while we may learn patience from an owl or cleverness from a crow or courage from a blue jay, we admire the chickadee most of all because of its indomitable spirit.

A chickadee rarely lives more than 30 months. Winter is the most common grim reaper, but, according to various bird researchers, that tiny bundle of feathers, weighing less than a handful of paper clips, employs an amazing winter survival system.

Among its survival ploys:

In preparation for winter, chickadees will stash food tidbits, seeds and such, and then months later exhibit a remarkable ability to recall where. Studies of its brain have shown that the memory part, the hippocampus, expands in autumn and contracts in size in spring, when a good memory is less critical to survival.

Starting in fall, when the days and nights cool, a chickadees will begin shivering its chest muscles ... on purpose ... to generate heat.

A chickadee's feathers, when fluffed for insulation, are a homeowners dream. Bird expert George Harrison noted that in cold weather the bird's feathers rise to create an inch-thick coat. It might be below zero an inch outside those feathers, but the temperature of the chickadee's body core will be more than 100 degrees.

At night, chickadees roost in cavities or deep into evergreen boughs and turn down their thermostats. While the bird's normal body temperature is 108 degrees during the day, its body temp drops to 90 degrees on the roost.

By now, we're all thinking, "The poor things, let's fill the bird feeders to save 'em."

A 3-year study of winter survival of chickadees in Wisconsin revealed that birds who did not visit bird feeders survived as well as those who relied on human handouts.

But there was one big exception.

When winter temps dropped below 10 degrees, chickadees who had access to black sunflower seeds, which they get from feeders, almost doubled their survival rate compared to those chickadees who did not receive the supplemental handouts.

Your friends would offer compliments.

How do you stay so thin over the holidays? Are those sunflowers flavored?

You can't weigh much more than a few paper clips.