Boreal Chickadee

Poecile hudsonicus

The Boreal Chickadee lives over most of Canada and Alaska. They are sometimes seen in the extreme northern regions of the lower 48 states of the USA. Science believes chickadees originally evolved from Eurasian tits that crossed over to North America during Pleistocene glacial periods, sometimes called the Ice Age, some 11,000 to 2.5 million years ago.

Taxonomists disagree on the subspecific classification of the Boreal Chickadee. A 1986 study called out five subspecies There is considerable overlap in their ranges:

• P. h. hudsonicus lives in eastern Manitoba to Labrador and Newfoundland (Canada).
• P. h. littoralis lives in southern Quebec and the Canadian Maritime Provinces.
• P. h. farleyi lives in the prairies of Alberta, the southern Mackenzie Valley, Saskatchewan, and western Manitoba (Canada).
• P. h. evura lives in the northern the Yukon and Northwest Territories (Canada).
• P. h. columbianus lives in British Columbia and southwestern Alberta (Canada).

Until my epic 16,000 mile tour of North America in 2022, the only Boreal Chickadee I had met was in 2005. I was traveling south along the Dempster Highway through the northern Yukon Territory, after leaving Inuvik a few days earlier. I stopped at a roadside camp along the Rock River between Fort McPherson and Eagle Plains. The meeting was brief, and I only captured a single frame before the bird disappeared. It was in 2022, while I was exploring Macintyre Marsh outside of Whitehorse (still in the Yukon Territory), that I spent a few minutes with a more cooperative bird.