Black-capped chickadee revealed as official bird of Regina

Regina’s official bird has proved that greatness can come from small beginnings.

The small-but-ferocious black-capped chickadee fought its way to the top to become the official bird of the City of Regina in its Bird Friendly City Regina contest.

The black-capped chickadee received more than 8,500 votes to win the contest and claim its new title. The chickadee’s competition for the crown were the American pelican, the Canada goose, the grey partridge, the peregrine falcon, and the red-breasted nuthatch.

The black-capped chickadee has been named Regina’s official bird. (Roman Hayter/980 CJME)

Ryan Fisher, a curator of vertebrate zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, was an advocate for the black-capped chickadee. He said he believes the chickadee won due to its accessibility.

“It’s a bird that’s kind of accessible to everyone,” he said. “Everyone has probably seen a chickadee, even if you might not have known it was a chickadee. You can see it in your backyard, you can see it when you’re out for a walk in your neighbourhood, and you can even see it downtown.”

In March of 2022, Regina was officially declared a Bird City through Nature Canada’s Bird Friendly City Program. Bird Friendly City Regina is a committee of 14 volunteers from the community and local environmental non-profits such as Nature Saskatchewan, Nature Regina and Salthaven West.

Angela Tremka, the program co-ordinator for Bird Friendly Regina, said this isn’t the end of the bird conversation in the city.

“Going forward, we hope to have lots of fun with our new official bird, the black-capped chickadee, and we will make sure that we include this in a lot of our events going forward,” she said.

“Bird Friendly Regina consists of a wonderful committee of many different organizations and we are working together with the City of Regina to ensure that we can be the best most healthy place for birds to survive.

“With that, we have a lot of different events planned up our sleeve and other items that we want to work towards and so we are going to make sure that the chickadee is the forefront of all those issues starting with, for example, window collisions which is a huge cause of birds declining across all of North America.”

The Bird Friendly City Regina contest created a lot of conversations and brought in a total of 21,000 votes.