Black-capped Chickadee painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

Audubon’s plate: plate 353, “Chesnut-backed Titmouse; Black-capt Titmouse; Chesnut-crowned Titmouse”

Plate 353 shows three kinds of small birds. The Black-capped Chickadees are figures 3 and 4, a male and a female, and Audubon wrote that “Chickadee” was the bird's usual name in the Eastern States.

Sitting one morning under a crab-apple tree, he watched a pair dig their own nest hole in its hard wood, carrying out chips for half an hour. A woodcutter in Maine told him how a flock raided his hanging food basket, perched over his fire to warm up and begged beside him while he ate. Audubon summed the bird up as “Hardy, smart, restless, industrious, and frugal.”

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 4 (1838). See plate 353 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

• John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 126: “Black cap Titmouse”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
• Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 103: “Chickadee”, with 4 other birds. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Black-capped Chickadee

• Black-capped Chickadees store food for later, tucking seeds into cracks in bark. (Source: National Audubon Society)

The oldest known wild Black-capped Chickadee lived at least 11 years and 9 months: it was banded in New York in 2009 and found there again in 2021. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?

Buying a print?

An original plate 353 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.