Chickadees hang out for a drink

This is my favorite, a lot going on. Besides the wing stabilizer and the fact that
 the bird is drinking, notice you can see him through the clear ice. Also look
how it clings to both sides of the icicle. I suppose they do it but I have never 
seen a bird cling with its feet in opposition like that,

This year for the first time I was at the East Pole long enough to justify putting out a bird feeder. I hung it off a corner post on the deck and it was there and full most of the time from the middle of December until the end of March.

In that time there was a constant flurry around it. At first maybe a dozen chickadees began hanging out. In time redpolls discovered it and a couple dozen of them came over. Interspersed with them, a couple of Pine grosbeaks stopped by every day and one day a hairy woodpecker showed up.

My presence didn't seem to deter them a bit. A couple of times they almost hit me as they flew around. My chopping block was almost directly under the feeder and even that activity didn't discourage activity around the feeder. It is so quiet in the woods, I could hear their wing beats overhead as I wrestled with firewood and they flew back and forth.

Note the drop of water from another icicle at upper left.

In all it mesmerized me at times and I would discover I had stopped doing whatever my task was and I was watching the interactions among the various birds.

Then one day something new happened. It came about around the middle of March, a time when I have mentioned the temperature on the porch sometimes reaches 80 degrees in the sunshine. I had finished my work for the day and poured three fingers of an expensive scotch over a handful of compressed snow and settled into my deck chair to sip the whiskey and watch the birds. In that heat snow on the roof had begun to melt and icicles formed along the eaves. It took a while to focus on the fact that some of the chickadees were landing on the icicles, clinging to them and staying for a moment or two. At one point I noticed a couple of drips falling off the tip of an icicle and it was in that

Note two drops falling. My friend Gretchen Small was
inspired by this photo to paint the picture at left.

observation I realized the chickadees were drinking the meltwater on the icicles.

Over the next few days I sat out there for several hours with my camera in my lap, watching them drink and sometimes even forgetting to lift the camera. In the process I was able to capture several good photos of this phenomenon. I posted a few of the photos on the Birds of Alaska facebook page and one of them got more than 200 likes and the other about 150. It seemed few if any people had observed this activity by chickadees.

Artwork by Gretchen Small

I found it so interesting, if rain hadn't appeared in the weather forecast, I'd probably still be out there photographing drinking chickadees. I've posted some photos here that show different ways the birds approached the icicles in order to catch a drink.

Birds of Alaska facebook page

This one's kind of a stretch.