A

nyone with a birdfeeder has seen a chickadee. But the pair of Gray-headed Chickadees flitting overhead through poplars at the edge of the boreal forest in Arctic Alaska were among the last anyone would ever see in North America. I should have said goodbye.

In June of 2016, Roman Dial and I were traversing Alaska’s western Brooks Range, crossing from the Noatak River to the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. We had been going hard for two days, and I was a bit fuzzy, exhausted, and sleep-deprived. As we passed through a small grove of poplars, I heard a distinct dee-deer and looked up to watch a pair of Gray-headed Chickadees flitting overhead.

I pointed the birds out to Dial. We paused for a minute on the slope of the shallow valley above a nameless tributary of the Tutuksuk River. We basked in the soundscape: a faint trickle of water, the occasional complaint of the birds, and deep quiet, not yet broken by the incessant whine of July mosquitoes. A dull ache had settled into my neck where the pack straps dug. It was just a moment in the extended day that stretches either side of solstice. We started up again and never looked back at the birds.

It was the last time I would see them. Now Gray-headed Chickadees may be gone from North America.

Chickadees are as familiar to most of us as robins, eagles, and ducks. A member of the Paridae, or tit, family of 59 species, the Gray-headed Chickadee is a variation on the basic chickadee, or tit, theme. A dozen species are indigenous to the ABA Area, and a 13th, the Great Tit, has recently become established in Wisconsin. Gray-headed Chickadees most resemble Boreal Chickadees, but have whiter faces, gray-brown heads, and more peevish voices. Like chickadees generally, Gray-headed Chickadees are easy to find when they are around, for they are busy, noisy, and inquisitive. Not including the Great Tit, the Gray-headed Chickadee is the only parid that occurs, or occurred, in both the Old World and the New World.

Known as the Siberian Tit to the rest of the world, the Gray-headed Chickadee, Poecile cinctus, lives in a narrow band of the Arctic boreal forest from Norway through Russia, and, until recently, into Alaska and northwestern Canada. There are four subspecies; three are found in Eurasia, while subspecies lathami is endemic to, or was endemic to, North America. The species was formerly known as the Siberian Tit in North America, too, but was renamed by the American Ornithological Society in 1997.

The species occupies a zone of tension between the northern tundra and the advancing forest, and it has been an especially rough neighborhood lately. Rapid warming of the Arctic, happening four times faster than at lower latitudes, is driving a cascade of effects: retreating sea ice, thawing permafrost, wild temperature fluctuations, shifting patterns of rain and snow, proliferation of shrubs, the northward advance of trees, and altered migration paths for birds and mammals.

As early as 1864, Roderick MacFarlane, while exploring the newly purchased Territory of Alaska, reported in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum that the “Siberian Chickadee” was an “active little wood sprite [that] is more or less common throughout the wooded interior.” Legendary field scientist Olaus Murie collected a dozen of the birds near Old Crow in the Yukon in 1926. Murie referred to these birds as “the Alaska Chickadee” whose range “borders the northern tree limit” where “it prefers the edges of forest tracts or regions where spruce forest is broken up.” Writing in Pacific Coast Avifauna in the early 1900s, ornithologist Joseph Grinnell wrote that the “Alaska Chickadee was an inhabitant of the spruce tracts along the base of mountains rather than in river bottoms.” Few researchers have had the fortitude to study these little birds in their vast wilderness homelands, and they are one of the least known birds in North America.

Gray-headed Chickadees remained locally common as recently as the early 2000s, and dedicated birders could reliably find them at specific locations. Known sites in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Noatak National Preserve attracted birders seeking Gray-headed Chickadees, and serious birders flocked to the Canning, Kelly, and Coleen rivers on the slopes of Alaska’s Brooks Range to add these birds to their life lists.

But the story takes a sudden turn starting seven years ago. Despite extensive searches in both Alaska and Canada, the birds have not been seen or reported since 2018.

As Hemingway once said of bankruptcy, the collapse of Gray-headed Chickadees in North America occurred gradually, then suddenly. Throughout the 1900s, the birds were regularly found as far south as Fairbanks, Bethel, and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. And, as noted above, as recently as the early 2000s, the birds could still be reliably found, but only at a few scattered poplar groves. Then they vanished altogether.

One of the last places the chickadees were regularly seen was along the Marsh Fork of the Canning River flowing north off the Brooks Range through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Marsh Fork lies at the heart of some of the wildest country in North America. It is a braided, clear-water river in a broad valley lined by rugged limestone ridges. Here, in isolated stands of poplar and willow well north of the boreal forest tree line, is where I first saw the species in the early 1990s.

My friend and neighbor, Bob Dittrick, founder of Wilderness Birding Adventures, was the first person to locate a nest site of Gray-headed Chickadees in North America. According to Dittrick, “Those Marsh Fork birds were using cavities in poplar trees. There aren’t a lot of trees big enough to have a nest cavity on the North Slope, though.”

For several decades, birders could count on seeing Gray-headed Chickadees on float trips down the Marsh Fork. “They were a reliable bird for us, then suddenly we couldn’t find them at all,” says Aaron Lang, the current owner of Wilderness Birding Adventures and an expert birder.

Dittrick and Lang concur that Northern Shrikes may have done in the last of the Marsh Fork chickadees. [See article, p. 16, in this issue. —Ed.] “When the young shrikes fledge, they just nail everything in sight, chickadees included,” says Dittrick.

“A lot of people have been out looking for them in all the usual places,” says Travis Booms of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, “but so far no one is finding them.”

Booms has deployed nest boxes in likely habitat areas in the Brooks Range and plans to establish a network of remote recording devices to detect the squeaky voices of Gray-headed Chickadees.

The Gray-headed Chickadee is recognized by the state of Alaska as a species of greatest conservation need. Booms, who also works in the Threatened, Endangered, and Diversity Program for the state of Alaska, is collaborating with his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on a petition to list the Gray-headed Chickadees as an endangered species. Such a listing could provide funding to expand the search for the missing birds. But if the birds are gone, are they endangered?

Few people have traveled more in the North American home range of Gray-headed Chickadees than Roman Dial, academic ecologist, mathematician, and adventure scientist. Dial has spent 40 years traversing the Brooks Range by foot and pack raft, most recently doing science. He has demonstrated how forest advance throughout the high northern latitudes—especially in the Brooks Range—is tied to sea ice retreat in the region. Dial has also investigated the phenomenon of “rusting rivers” and how “Arctic greening”—recent changes in vegetation visible from satellites—may be altering migration routes of caribou.

“I saw those chickadees on the Wulik River back in the early 2000s during a 600-mile traverse of the northern edge of the Brooks Range,” says Dial. “But over the past decade, even with field crews working every summer at tree line, we haven’t seen them again.”

Dial and I have experienced changes in the Arctic firsthand. I was enveloped in smoke on the Colville in 2007 from the first lightning-caused tundra fire ever noted on Alaska’s North Slope. Dial encountered the problem of rusting rivers when his powdered milk curdled in water dipped from a seemingly pristine but acidic stream. Together we fought through willow thickets that have closed off centuries-old caribou migration routes, enduring days of lashing rain in the formerly semi-arid western Brooks Range.

And on that June day in 2016, we may have seen one of the last pairs of Gray-headed Chickadees in North America.

Theories abound as to what happened to the birds. Some say avian flu, others say endocrine disrupters, or insect declines, or genetic swamping by the very similar and more common Boreal Chickadee. Very little overt habitat destruction, such as logging, mining, or roadbuilding, has occurred in their North American range that can be blamed for the fade-out of the birds. Despite the decades-long controversy over oil development in the Arctic Refuge, where the chickadees were last seen in 2017, the area remains wild and intact.

Whatever wiped out Gray-headed Chickadees is not just a local phenomenon. The circumpolar range of Gray-headed Chickadees mirrors the zone where the effects of climate change are most dramatic.

“The ecotone between the boreal forest and the Arctic tundra is where the action is,” says Dial. “It’s an epicenter of climate change.”

As these birds have disappeared from North America, their populations have also fallen in other parts of their range. Research from Norway by Svein Dale and Ellen T. Andreassen, reported in Ornis Fennica in 2016, implicates climate change as a potential contributor to the declines there.

Bush pilots blame mid-winter rain-on-snow events for the demise of Dall sheep (the iconic nominate Alaskan subspecies, dalli, of the thinhorn sheep) across the Brooks Range. Tropical storms that push warm, moist air deep into Alaska in the middle of winter have increased in frequency and intensity, laying down impenetrable ice crusts that make life hard for caribou, moose, Dall sheep, and, presumably, birds.

“These inch-thick crusts are like a coat of armor over everything,” observes Knut Kielland, an ecologist at the University of Alaska.

The ice makes travel exceedingly difficult for large, heavy mammals like moose, and it locks away forage that caribou and Dall sheep cannot paw through to get at lichens and grasses. Winter rains cause quiviut, the fine hair of muskox, to rot along their spines.

Some species in the family Paridae deploy ingenious thermoregulatory adaptations to endure cold winters when food is scarce. They can reduce their body temperatures by close to 7° C to conserve heat and food demands. Such a strategy might work for a little bird that can fluff its feathers and hunker down, but what happens when a bird is soaked through with freezing rain and then iced over?

And it’s not just hypothermia from soggy feathers that puts birds at risk. Chickadees cache large quantities of high-energy food that can be rendered inaccessible by freezing rain or inedible because of decay. Gray-headed Chickadees, unlike others of their kind, don’t tend to flock with other family groups, perhaps further increasing their vulnerability to harsh weather. Travis Booms of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game speculates that the extreme variability of winter weather throughout Alaska in recent decades, with temperatures rising well above freezing and then plummeting deeply below zero, may have played fatal havoc with the chickadees.

Relatively few landbird species breed in both the Old World and the New World, and fewer still inhabit the circumboreal regions year-round. The short list includes Willow and Rock ptarmigans, Common Raven, Gyrfalcon, Snowy Owl, Short-eared Owl, Boreal Owl, Redpoll, and Gray-headed Chickadee. The largely treeless, windswept North Slope is a harsh place once the brief Arctic summer ends. Many of the ravens, gyrfalcons, and owls head south during the coldest depths of northern winters; the redpolls are known to use subnivean rodent burrows.

“It’s possible those Marsh Fork birds simply hopped over the passes into the boreal forests on the southern slopes of the Brooks Range when summer was over,” says Aaron Lang.

“They always showed up every winter,” says Alaska frontiersman Heimo Korth, who has trapped from a cabin on the Coleen River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for 40 years.

“Those chickadees would come pick the fat off my caribou and moose caches. But I haven’t seen them in over a decade,” he says.

Recent surveys where Gray-headed Chickadees had been routinely encountered in modern times have turned up only the closely related Boreal Chickadees. Olaus Murie, writing in The Auk in 1928, noted that the two species were “separated by habitat choice, even though their general range may greatly overlap. Possibly this separation is not equally sharp in every instance. In winter, also, there may be a somewhat different distribution and greater mingling of the two forms.”

Is it possible that Gray-headed Chickadees were subsumed by interbreeding with Boreal Chickadees? There is no direct evidence of hybridization, and authors as far back as Grinnell maintained that the one “was never seen in the company with the other species.”

A possible Pleistocene Epoch relic like the boreal plants that grow on both sides of the Bering Strait, Gray-headed Chickadees could have spread across the Bering Land Bridge when it provided uninterrupted habitat from Eurasia to North America. For the chickadees, their foothold in North America may have become increasingly tenuous as the climate warmed and the watery ocean gap re-opened between Alaska and Eurasia. This disjunction of habitat is anomalous for chickadees worldwide because they generally occupy contiguous, not far-flung, habitat areas. Isolation from the main population source in Eurasia may have increased the vulnerability of “our” Gray-headed Chickadees.

The reality is that we don’t know how many Gray-headed Chickadees are left in the world or how they are doing. Most of the habitat for these birds lies in Russia, where estimates range from 20,000 to over 200,000 birds. Because of the Ukraine war, very little research, across a spectrum of fields, is emerging from Russia at the present time. The fate of a little gray bird is hardly one of Putin’s priorities.

Chickens, not chickadees, may be coming home to roost in Alaska. The state derives 85% of its revenue from oil extraction. The self-inflicted wounds of climate chaos driven by the oil economy are visible everywhere in Alaska: shrinking glaciers, villages washing away, dramatic increases in wildfires, failing salmon runs, the loss of sea ice that dooms walruses and polar bears, and now, apparently, the demise of Gray-headed Chickadees.

The Gray-headed Chickadees of Alaska may be one of the first avian victims of climate change, but they will likely soon have company. There are broad declines of birds across the Arctic that are viscerally evident to many long-time observers.

“It’s eerie how quiet the tundra is, like a new Silent Summer,” says Roman Dial.

As reported by Paulo Mateus Martins and coauthors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024, the ranges of 70 North American birds have shifted northward and some of these birds are experiencing an “arctic squeeze as suitable conditions are pushed off the edge of the map.”

The exact mechanisms driving these declines and range shifts are still unclear. Many plants and animals are acutely sensitive to small changes in temperature; a temperature rise of 2° C led directly to eightfold increases in the sterility of insects, as reported by Bradford Carlton Lister and Andres Garcia in Ecology in 2018. The Snow Bunting, another Arctic passerine, exhibits overheating even at low air temperatures. One of the many speculations offered up is that a mismatch of timing, or phenology, is occurring between birds and their foods.

“These chickadees have their young on exactly the same days each year,” says Aaron Lang, “but if the bugs hatch two weeks earlier, or two weeks later, the birds may have nothing to feed their babies.”

The Wildlife Conservation Society has proposed the framework for a captive breeding program to re-establish Gray-headed Chickadees in Alaska. Yet two of the “trigger” criteria for this “last ditch attempt to keep the species extant” are problematic for these birds. First, have the original causes of the population decline been identified? And second, is there an appropriate population source? In both cases, the answer is no. We don’t know what caused their disappearance, and there apparently are no more of the endemic North American subspecies lathami to capture and breed. If a fundamental change in their environment caused the chickadees to blink out, why would we expect them to do better next time?

North America hasn’t lost a well-established breeding bird species since the Eskimo Curlew and Bachman’s Warbler vanished in the 1960s; both are now presumed extinct. While apparently gone from North America, Gray-headed Chickadees don’t seem at immediate risk of global extinction. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the species as being of “least concern,” the lowest level on a scale that ranges up to critically endangered. Global population estimates are all over the map, from as low as two million to as high as 25 million.

The Thick-billed Parrot and Aplomado Falcon are interesting analogs to the chickadees. Both species vanished from the American Southwest in the early 20th century, but persist in northern Mexico. An attempted reintroduction of the parrots into the Chiricahua Mountains of Southeast Arizona failed in the 1980s and 1990s; a reintroduction of the falcons in South Texas is ongoing with some success. There have been isolated records of both species in recent decades in the Southwest.

It is at least conceivable that Thick-billed Parrots and Aplomado Falcons could re-establish in the U.S. by natural extension of their Mexican ranges. It is beyond imagining that anything more than an errant Gray-headed Chickadee could cross the Bering Strait to repopulate Alaska. Chickadees are largely sedentary; they don’t move around much from their home ranges. No chickadees of any species have ever been recorded at the remote Bering Sea outposts such as Attu Island, St. Lawrence Island, or the Pribilof Islands.

The search for the birds continues. I have floated many dozens of Brooks Range rivers and creeks over the past 40 years—from the Firth River flowing along the Canadian border into the Beaufort Sea to the Ipewik flowing out to Point Hope and the Chukchi Sea, and dozens in between—seeking specifically these birds. The few birds I saw are now only memories.

None of the experts I have asked offered up where else to look. With all the money and optics and eagerness chasing what, for high-end birders, has become a “grail bird,” it is hard to imagine the birds are just hiding somewhere we haven’t thought to look.

“They are my favorite bird,” says Aaron Lang. “It’s tough to think that they may be gone.”

Like Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, whose extinction some still refuse to accept, the search for Gray-headed Chickadees may continue until we simply forget they ever existed. 

Brad Meiklejohn is Senior Alaska Representative for The Conservation Fund. Since 1994, he has been directly involved in the protection of 400,000 acres of bird habitat in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, New England, and South America. Brad is an adventurer, a Buddhist scholar, and a writer.