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Fine-art Black-capped Chickadee plate in the Audubon style, perched in a snow-dusted pine.
Each print is made to order. You can cancel within 12 hours of ordering, after which it goes into production and cannot be cancelled. Secure checkout via Stripe.
Printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm.
Snow on the pine bough. A small bird, entirely unbothered. The Black-capped Chickadee perches in the winter-weighted needles, black cap and bib reading crisp against the pale scene, buff flanks warm against the cool white around it. This is the season plate for the bird that never leaves.
Poecile atricapillus does not migrate. It holds its territory through northern winters when the temperature drops to minus 20, and it survives by means that are, on close inspection, astonishing. Each autumn the bird’s hippocampus - the brain structure responsible for spatial memory - enlarges by roughly 30 percent. It does this to cache thousands of seeds in separate hiding places across its territory, each stored singly and each location memorised individually. By spring the cache is gone and the neurons that held the map dissolve. The brain rebuilds itself each year around the demands of the season.
A bird that caches uses the winter light differently from one that simply forages. Every visit to the feeder is also a survey of the territory. Every seed carried away is placed somewhere specific and retained. The bird weighing nine to 14 grams on the pine branch in this plate is running one of the most precise spatial memory systems in vertebrate biology.
On the coldest nights it practises regulated hypothermia, dropping body temperature by up to 10 degrees Celsius to reduce the overnight caloric burn, then shivering back to operating temperature at dawn. It has been doing this for whatever winter it finds itself in. This one happens to be on a pine, in the Audubon tradition, on a wall.
Full field guide: /species/black-capped-chickadee/
Each print is made to order through our global print partner and shipped from the production lab nearest you - allow a few days for printing plus local tracked delivery.
Each print is made to order. You can change or cancel it within 12 hours of ordering. After that it goes into production and can no longer be cancelled, though we will always put right anything that arrives damaged.
The available sizes (up to 24x30 inches) and any framed finishes are shown above. Choose yours before checkout.
Yes - each print is sized to fit standard frames. Framed finishes are offered on many prints.
Because each print is made to order, contact us within 14 days of delivery and we will put it right.
