The Complex Call of the Carolina Chickadee What can the chick-a-
dee call teach us about communication and language? If you live
in North America, Europe or Asia near a forest, suburban open
woodlands or even an urban city park, chances are you have heard
a member of the avian family Paridae—the chickadees, tits and
titmice. Birds use calls to communicate with their flockmates,
and most parids share a unique call system, the chick-a-dee
call. The call has multiple notes that are arranged in diverse
ways. The resulting variation is extraordinary: The chick-a-dee
call is one of the most complex signaling systems documented in
nonhuman animal species. Much research on the chick-a-dee call
has considered Carolina chickadees, Poecile carolinensis, a
species common in the southeastern United States. We focus on
this species here, but we also compare findings from other
parids. We discuss how the production and reception of these
calls may be shaped over individual development, and also how
ecological and evolutionar