09-36: Where Have the Gray-headed Chickadees Gone with Brad Meiklejohn
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Gray-headed Chickadee is certainly one of the most enigmatic species of breeding birds in the ABA Area. Though it is found broadly across northern Eurasian it was, until very recently, also known from an isolated breeding population in northern Alaska and far northwestern Canada. Those bird, long a bucket list objective for ABA Area birders, might be gone, and the reasons for that are unclear. Alaska birder and conservationist Brad Meiklejohn explores their disappearance in the Lost on the Frontier: The Mysterious Disappearance of North America's Rarest Breeding Bird, published in the July 2025 issue of Birding magazine, and he joins us to talk more about this avian mystery. Stay tuned for a publicly accessible version of this article.
Also, the auction featuring some of our past Bird of the Year cover art is up and running!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | National Geographic's beloved bird field guide just got even better with the revised 8th edition, |
| 0:06.1 | complete with new eBird-based range maps. |
| 0:08.3 | It features all the birds of Canada and the United States, now including Hawaii, 1,150 species in all. |
| 0:15.5 | The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds is available wherever books are sold. |
| 0:29.9 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Birding Association. |
| 0:35.9 | I am Nate Swick, your host. Remember last week when I briefly mentioned the art auction at AVA.org featuring some of the bird of |
| 0:38.2 | the gear art we've accumulated over the years. It is up. It is open. It is silly that we kept |
| 0:43.9 | this wonderful bird art in our offices such that they even exist for so long. Great bird art |
| 0:49.2 | is meant to be shared, displayed on walls of birders across the ABA area. |
| 0:55.4 | There's some wonderful stuff there if you want to go check it out going all the way back |
| 0:59.6 | to our very first bird of the year cover art, the American Kestrel looking out over the |
| 1:04.2 | ruins of Tikal in Guatemala by Louise Zemitis. |
| 1:08.8 | Coming through the Common Nighthawk by Andrew Gutenberg, one of my favorites, |
| 1:13.1 | to the Evening Grosbeaks by Julie Ziccifu's, Green Heron by Rafa Galvez, all the way to the |
| 1:17.9 | wonderful common loon cover by Sam Zimmerman that we featured this year in 2025. |
| 1:23.8 | There's even a John James Audubon print, though we haven't been around long enough to have had him as a bird of the year artist. |
| 1:30.5 | It is his wood duck print, which for my money is one of his finest. |
| 1:34.2 | Old JJ was best when he incorporated native plants into his work, and the wood ducks cavorting in a sycamore is a really nice one. |
| 1:41.9 | And Tony Fitzpatrick, of our 2020 bird of the year, |
| 1:44.6 | Cedar Wax Wing, offers a similarly eclectic piece for the 2024 bird of the year, |
| 1:49.6 | Golden Wing Warbler. It was one that was actually featured on the limited edition |
| 1:53.4 | Gold Wing Pilsner that was brewed by Kinshlaugger Brewing that year. So you can either have |
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