Photo by Greg7 on Flickr, via Wikipedia Commons
The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is, as its name suggests, a chickadee with chestnut-colored feathers on its back and under its wings. The mask/cap and throat are similar to the more familiar Black-capped Chickadee. (Their cousin, the Mountain Chickadee, has a white eye stripe.)
Like other chickadees, the Chestnut-backed Chickadee has a large head in proportion to the rest of its body, making it look kind of like a Weeble with a tail. They are small birds, 4 - 5 inches long, with small, black beaks and fairly long tails. Most of their diet is comprised of insects, but they will eat seeds and berries.
Chestnut-backed Chickadees live on the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Central California, and across northern Washington and Idaho. I saw them for the first time at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, near the Raptor Center; the folks at the Raptor Center keep some feeders full, and the feeders are routinely visited by nuthatches, chickadees, towhees and the ubiquitous sparrows. (This sort of begs the question, are they trying to tease the raptors? Perhaps not, since not all raptors like to eat songbirds; some would rather nosh on larger birds or mammals.)
