Chickadees, gardens, and misplaced ecological anxiety

In Ontario — including the Greater Toronto Area — the chickadee most people encounter is the Black-capped Chickadee. It is a small, resident woodland bird that has adapted extremely well to fragmented landscapes, mixed forests, ravines, parks, and suburban neighbourhoods.

Habitat and habits

Chickadees are canopy and shrub foragers, not garden-bed birds. They spend much of their time in trees and hedgerows, gleaning insects, larvae, spiders, and eggs from bark and foliage. They cache food, move quickly, and rarely linger at water features or open lawns. As a result, many gardeners are unaware they are present at all — even when chickadees are regularly using nearby trees and wooded edges.

This unobtrusive behaviour is typical and should not be interpreted as a sign that a garden is “failing” ecologically.

Population status: stable and secure

According to The State of Canada’s Birds — a collaboration between Environment and Climate Change Canada and Birds Canada — Black-capped Chickadee populations have shown a moderate increase since 1970 and are currently within their population goal range, meaning they are considered secure at a national level.

Long-term datasets support this conclusion:

• Breeding Bird Survey data show stable to increasing trends across southern Ontario and Quebec
• Christmas Bird Count records consistently list chickadees among the most frequently observed birds in Ontario

Because chickadees are year-round residents and tolerant of varied habitats, they do not show the steep declines seen in more specialized groups such as aerial insectivores or long-distance migrants.

Why chickadees are a poor proxy for garden “success”

Chickadees are often invoked in arguments that urban gardeners must dramatically increase caterpillar production — usually by planting exclusively native host plants — to prevent bird population collapse. This framing oversimplifies both chickadee ecology and urban systems.

Chickadees do feed insects, including caterpillars, to their young. But they are dietary generalists, exploiting a wide range of prey types and thriving in human-altered landscapes. Their continued abundance in cities reflects ecological flexibility, not dependence on any single planting strategy.

As a result:

• Chickadee stability does not indicate that all birds are doing well
• Nor does it imply that individual urban gardens are responsible for population decline
• And it should not be used as evidence of poor garden management

Ironically, chickadees persist precisely because they are not specialists.

A note of caution on ecological messaging

Some popular ecological narratives — often amplified by enthusiastic followers of Doug Tallamy— present chickadees as fragile indicators of food-web collapse, dependent on “oodles” of caterpillars supplied by individual gardens. While well-intentioned, this framing risks turning adaptable, resilient birds into symbols of crisis where none exists.

Chickadees are not disappearing from Ontario cities. They are doing what they have always done: using trees, edges, and mixed habitats efficiently in a changing landscape.

In context

Chickadees tell us something important — but not what they are often asked to prove. Their stable populations reflect adaptability, not ecological failure. They are a reminder that urban ecosystems are shaped by scale, structure, and flexibility — not by moralised planting checklists.

Well done, Ontario urban home gardeners for quietly supporting the insects, soils, and adaptable wildlife that keep everyday ecology functioning. In that modest but essential role, Ontario’s gardens are silent heroes.

Sources and data links

• State of Canada’s Birds – Black-capped Chickadee species profile

https://naturecounts.ca/nc/socb-epoc/species.jsp?sp=bkcchi

• Environment and Climate Change Canada – Breeding Bird Survey trend maps

https://wildlife-species.canada.ca/breeding-bird-survey-results/P005/A001/

• Birds Canada – Christmas Bird Count summaries

https://www.birdscanada.org/what-we-do/research-monitoring/christmas-bird-count/