As I’ve brought up before, when contemplating the pros and cons of low infant mortality for humans, chickadees invariably come to mind. Part of the reason for this is that I have made and installed a number of nest boxes tailored for tiny birds. The most frequent tenants during breeding season are chestnut-backed chickadees, but I also get violet-green swallows, red-breasted nuthatches, and less often black-capped chickadees and Bewick’s wrens.

In fact, a recent article in the New York Times—in questioning the overall value of feeding birds in the UK—cites the apparent chick-rearing “success” of one of their chickadee equivalents (blue tit), boosted by bird-feeding practices. The article indicates that the tit’s “success” is upsetting biodiversity by displacing other woodland cavity-nesters, thereby leading to decline and threatening the survival of other species. I had already planned to write a post on a hypothetical chickadee explosion, and this article reinforced that impulse as a real-live case-in-point.

In this post, we’ll explore the absurd consequences that would obtain if medical intervention somehow eliminated fledgling mortality among chickadees, so that all the birds in a brood reached reproductive age. The results become disastrous in a shockingly-short time. Go ahead and make a guess as to how long before chickadees overwhelm the entire Community of Life. I may have biased you already by saying it’s shockingly short. But given that I call the 10,000 year period since agriculture began “a flash” on ecological scales, who knows what I even mean by “short.” Ignoring my characterization, then, what does your intuition say?

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