Dan, could you forward my most recent posting about albino chickadees to
BIRDCHAT? From the posting by Byron Butler it sounds as if this is a more
interesting phenomenon than I had suspected. I know people have kept
chickadees successfully in captivity, so I don't understand what his
problem was, but it certainly sounds like a relationship between nutrition
(or captivity itself?) and coloration. Could it be we are screwing up these
chickadees by "capturing" them at feeders at which not all their
nutritional needs are met? Remember, we have discussed white-winged crows
that were probably so because of nutritional deficiencies. Is there a new
kind of sunflower seed that is doing this? This really needs understanding
on our part.

As an addendum, I can't recommend highly enough Susan M. Smith's book _The
Black-capped Chickadee_ as a natural-history study worth reading. I suspect
we're all chickadee fanciers--how could you not be?


Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound email: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416