I hold the necklace in my hand and contemplate throwing it away. Turning the pendant over, I see that over the years, the oil from my skin has stripped away the nickel polish from both sides of the pendant, a bird with its wings outstretched, always in flight, always moving but never landing. Yet, the necklace holds special meaning. My mother gave it to me soon after our family’s return to the States from five years of missionary service in distant Mongolia. Not known for sentimental talk, Mom gave the necklace to me, saying, “You’re my little bird, flying here and there around the world.”
A few years after our return from Mongolia, the cell phone took hold and Mom never knew where I was calling from. “You could be anywhere,” she would say. “Where are you now?”
I remember flying over the Bering Strait, looking out from the window of the passenger jet, I followed the mountains and shoreline of what should be the nation of South Korea where the terrain seamlessly changed from Asian country to another until clouds blocked my view. After a one-night stay in Beijing, our family would take a short flight to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the newly formed Democratic Republic of Mongolia, and we made it our home from 1995 to the year 2000.
Later, in 2002, I returned to Mongolia to teach English and computer skills. In 2004, it was Thailand. In 2008, I taught English to middle-grade educators in a region of northeast China labeled “Inner Mongolia.” While there, I visited the unique city of Menjouli which sits beside a river that separates China from Russia. My feet never seemed to land, so it’s no wonder it was important to Mom to know where I was.
I’ve learned that there are seven chickadee species that breed in North America, all of which have the distinctive dark cap and white cheeks. The black-capped chickadee never leaves its northern home of three to four acres. This bird knows her territory and every square inch where she cheerfully calls out her chick-a-dee-dee-dee summer and winter alike.
With seven species of chickadee in North America, chances are the birds you’ve seen in your yard are one of these. When the chickadee shows up at your birdfeeder and steals off with a sunflower seed, she does not eat it. Rather, she cracks off the outer shell and drops the seed-meat into one of her hiding places which is often a nest left behind by a woodpecker. Deep inside the tree, she cleans out the debris and transforms the woodpecker’s old home for her own purpose.
The chickadee is adept at hunting and feeding with its sharp bill. She pries open nooks and crannies of trees in search of insects eggs, larva, or bugs. Instinct tells her that she needs protein and fat and that she must search it out herself. It won’t come to her.
I took a day shopping on our preliminary visit to Mongolia in 1993. When Mongolia shed her ties to the Soviet government in January 1990, the first decade on her own was one of deprivation and hunger. An expatriate named Dianne Willis took me out to the few shops that had any products. Passing by long bread lines for citizens with ration cards, we entered my first shop. To the right were deep shelves with solitary rows of cooking oil, ketchup, and scouring powder. Ahead was a pile of cabbage which sat beside the clerk who charged each person for one item at a time, sending us back in line to buy our second item and again for our third.
Cabbage rots easily through a Mongolian winter. So, before our first winter was upon us, my dear language tutor—Older Sister Bor—taught me how to preserve cabbage, carrot, and onion for the months ahead. Much like my grandmother Esther’s frozen cabbage salad, these chopped vegetables swam in a salty, oily brine that kept well out of doors. So, I only needed to step outside onto my balcony and chisel a chunk of frozen vegetables from the large plastic barrel. Then, I would drop the chunk into a pot of boiling broth with beef and noodles.
The chickadee knows how to survive the cold winter. Studies show that there is no difference between summer and winter in regard to the thermal conductance of her body. Her ability to stay warm comes from something else. First of all, the chickadee seems to understand that she will need ten times more energy to keep herself warm through the long winter. She’s not alone, her faithful mate will divide the labor with her, feeding their offspring with their bright yellow beaks and making multiple trips from the field to cache, from cache to nest through all seasons of their life.
Neither does this little bird store the energy in the form of fat on her little body. Rather, the secret of the chickadee is in the feathers. She can fluff air between her feathers, providing the layers of insulation she needs to survive subzero temperatures for months on end.
I brought one large down parka with me to Mongolia. It was the color of eggplant. Off to the market I went, well-wrapped in a cashmere scarf and hat with the hood of my parka tied tightly beneath my chin. Money for the bus fare hid under my coat in the pocket of my slacks. Though I was double-gloved, I managed to pull my wallet in and out of the inner pocket for each transaction.
Outer pockets of my parka held tissues for my eyes and that would weep in the bitter cold. Sometimes, I wore sunglasses to hold off the wild sandstorms that kicked up in April. A woman had to be prepared.
From September to May, I wore undergarments of silk beneath my warm trousers, three layers of socks, wool for the outer two but the first pair that I slipped on were made of material which could to wick away sweat. My Sorrel® boots made strange footprints as I waddled alongside Mongolian women in their high-heeled Russian boots. I never heard a single complaint from a woman so dressed. She was raised in that sub-Siberian weather. I was not.
The chickadee adapts to the cold. Biologist Susan Smith provides an explanation. “Carefully hidden food items, dense winter coats, specially selected winter roost cavities and, perhaps most remarkable of all, the ability to go into nightly hypothermia, thus conserving large amounts of energy, greatly increase the chances of survival.”
Namely, it is this nocturnal hypothermia that will enable the chickadee to endure the harsh season of winter. The chickadee can actually lower its body temperature in a controlled manner as low as 12 to 15 degrees lower than her normal daytime temperature of 108 degrees Fahrenheit. In doing so, she will not need to eat as much as she normally would to keep her metabolism aflight.
My husband supervised the building of our strawbale house on the outskirts of the capital city of Ulaanbaatar in 1997. Two years of living in the difficult Mongolian apartments were behind us. No more waiting for the electricity or the water to come back on. No more filling bathtubs with icy cold water and warming them with dangerous electrical wands. No more filling large plastic tubs of water for the next day’s use when the water came on at 4 o’clock in the morning.
We would control the flow of water and electricity and live closer to the earth. We would make our own place. So, we arranged with a Mongolian family to lease their parcel of land for ten years. At the close of ten years, the family would take possession of everything we built upon their land. House, garage, cabin, outhouse, horse stable, coal bin.
Below our piece of land beside the country road, a spring with fresh water gurgled up along the well-traveled highway. It was common to see a child, a woman, or a man pulling a large metal container filled with cold, fresh spring water using a cart to transport the water across the highway and up the ruddy, rocky terrain to their cabin or yurt hidden behind tall fences. Our needs were superfluous. We hired a water truck to fill up on spring water and to deliver every five days to our water house, a room on the east side of our home which held a huge metal vat. Through a trapdoor in the thick walls, the waterman would place the tube from his tank to ours. One of our three children would watch the water level from inside the water room, shouting in Mongolian, “Enough, enough!” when the water reached four to five feet deep. That would be plenty of water for showers and for washing dishes and clothing. Water for filtering and drinking. Water for soup and for steaming bread dumplings. Water for hot morning tea with sugar.
My husband was resourceful. He placed a car battery beside the water tank to energize the little gravity-fed pump which forced the water to the kitchen and bathroom. The water made its journey through an electric metal box near the kitchen sink which could heat a few liters of water for washing dishes in the kitchen. Wait twenty minutes and you could wash your hair in the bathroom sink with wonderful, hot water.
The temperature in the water room remained a mere few degrees above freezing—through the long sub-zero winter—warmed by a little fan in the wall which was energized by heat conduction from our home-made solar panels on the south side of the house.
The chickadee, according to the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, is considered a member of an elite group of animals with well-developed cognitive abilities. Particularly, they store food externally in preparation for their future energy needs. This phenomenon is called food hoarding or caching.
When the chickadee stores her seeds and bugs she is using a type of intelligence that utilizes her spatial memory. Research on Alaskan chickadees indicates that “Alaskan chickadees cached significantly more food, recovered caches more efficiently, and performed more accurately on an associative learning task which relied on spatial memory as compared with one involving color cues which did not” (Adelson). The chickadee is able to keep track of hundreds of sources of nourishment and all the places that she has stashed it. Hard to imagine, but studies show the chickadee can remember over a thousand hiding places.
Our humble house plan included another room, a storage room that lined the back of the largest bedroom where Bill and I slept. This room, the size of a walk-in closet, became another layer of insulation from the cold north wind. The door was always secured with a padlock. No doubt our house helpers Ana and Sara were awfully curious to know what treasures were kept inside.
Besides future clothing needs, such as undergarments and tennis shoes, the rough wooden shelves held rows of Amway products, namely dish and laundry detergent. I took after my grandmother, Esther Burrows, in this regard: I wrote dates on the bottle with a Sharpie to indicate when the bottle was opened and put into use. From my calculations, one bottle lasted three months. Having returned to Mongolia after three months in the States, my goal was to stretch our supplies from September 1997 until our return to the States in the spring of 2000. If one bottle lasted three months, then eight bottles would give us 24 months. If we were frugal we could make it the necessary 32 months.
There were towels too. Tall stacks of navy-colored towels. These, however, I happily gave out as gifts as it seemed to me that the tower of towels would never run out. There was still a modest amount of towels to give away in our hasty departure on February 29th of 2000. You see, we never made it to spring.
The chickadee knows the location of all of her caches. Even more amazing she remembers the contents as well. In an experiment with black-capped chickadees who were allowed to only cache two types of seed, the chickadee always recovered the type they preferred over the nonpreferred. The first evidence in support of this claim came from an experiment in 1984 by scientist David F. Sherry.
In this experiment, Sherry demonstrated that black-capped chickadees cached dehusked sunflower seeds more readily than whole sunflower seeds, and later when the weather called for it, the bird would return first to her seed meat caches and not to the cache with seeds still in their husks. Could it be that the chickadee knows the de-husked sunflower seed is more perishable than the whole sunflower seed? She seems to appreciate that seeds with husks will keep, but the dehusked ones will not.
In that first year in Ulaanbaatar, food shopping for the family was likened to hunting. Others had warned me about the tiring affair, but now I grasped first-hand the truth of it. Many hours were spent on foot in search of nourishment to see a family through the next two days at a time. When a woman such as myself would find a good shop with bars of soap or shampoo, she would buy as many as she could afford or carry. The reason hid in the fact that her return to the shop a week later in search of “more of the same” might be futile. Often the store would be gone, overtaken, or boarded up. The shop that had sold hand lotion now sold backpacks. Not in the market for a backpack? It makes no matter. Next week the shop has been turned into a home goods store with hinges, batteries, screwdrivers, and cigarette lighters.
When eggs and milk disappeared in December 1995, I knew we were in trouble. Thankfully, Bor and I had preserved our vegetables in the oily brine, and the tortillas which I employed Bor to make for us called for neither eggs nor milk.
When the chickadee calls out cheerfully in the dead of winter, most other creatures are dormant. However, she has traveling companions who gather in the flock with her when it is not breeding season. Companions, such as the red-breasted nuthatch, appreciate the chickadee’s alarm system. A normal call for the chickadee is a chicka-dee-dee-dee. But when the chickadee sees an owly predator nearby she adds two more dee’s. The five “dees” in her call gain the attention of the nuthatches who heed her call and flock together to stay safe before that dangerous owl swoops past.
I must protect my children. Second to staying warm and fed, enriching my children’s life is a high priority. The ways of communism died slowly. It takes years for free trade and democracy to take hold. So, my husband and I had to find ways to keep life cheerful for our three children. For the first year in the country, we attended the Sunday evening church service in English. On our walk home to our apartment, we would have ice cream cones.
When we moved into our strawbale house, we found ourselves caring for a small herd of riding horses and kept four goats at the request of our youngest daughter Mary. For most of our years in Mongolia, we were involved in a homeschool cooperative with other missionaries from the U.S.A, Korea, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. The mothers held baking contests, simulated trips to exotic places, and celebrated the familiar holidays with familiar traditions.
No matter what the political climate was outside, we dug deep into our emotional pockets and found ways to help our children cherish their time overseas. I will never forget the generosity of the U.S. Ambassador, Mr. La Porta, who sponsored a production of The Wizard Of Oz complete with costumes and music. Our oldest daughter Joanna played Dorothy and won the ambassador’s heart.
Little Mary learned traditional shoulder dancing and camped beside the Tuul River with friends. Surprisingly, Mary was befriended by a couple who produced a morning TV show that features their daughter Helen. Mary made four appearances on that show and was recognized when we were out and about.
Our oldest son Peter made a go-cart and built his own cabin with a wood stove for heat and electric lines for light. And nothing was better than to escape to lovely, hot Thailand. Sometimes, we just had to get away, and finally, we left Mongolia for good to preserve our family intact.
There is a website dedicated to the 10 most fascinating facts about the chickadee. The last one captures my eye. “Chickadees let neurons containing old, useless information die and allow new ones to form so that they can adapt to changes in their environment. That would be like us forgetting old phone numbers to make room for email addresses.”
Mongolia is behind me now. While the memories are rich with sadness and joy, the information and habits I mastered to keep my family warm, fed, and happy are useless here in the States. With only a few clicks on the cell phone, dinner will be delivered and Amazon stands ready with anything we might need.
Lori Younker, June 2023
Sources Cited
The following articles were accessed through https://ScienceDirect.com
BROCKMANN, H. JANE. Advances in the Study of Behavior. Elsevier, 2010.
BRODIN, A., Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, 2010.
CLAYTON, NICOLA S. & SOHA, JILL A, in Advances in the Study of Behavior, 1999. Memory in Avian Food Caching and Song Learning: A General Mechanism or Different Processes?
DAWSON W. R. & WHITTOW, G.C. “Regulation of Body Temperature” in Sturkie’s Avian Physiology (Fifth Edition), 2000.
KAMIL, A.C. & GOULD, KRISTY, “Spatial Memory in Food-Hoarding Animals” in Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, (2nd Edition), 2017.
SHERRY, DAVID F. “Food storage by black-capped chickadees: Memory for the location and contents of caches.” Animal Behaviour, (1984).
Other websites cited in this essay:
ADELSON, RACHEL, FOOD FOR THOUGHT, July/August 2002, Vol 33, No. 7 American Pyschological Association, printed at https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/food
MARTINEZ JR, TIMOTHY, April 23, 2013, in 10 Interesting Facts about Chicadees https://www.backyardchirper.com/blog/10-interesting-facts-about-chickadees/
WOOD, FRANCES, Chickadee Codes at https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/chickadee-codes accessed, 02.04.22
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