Happy Holidays from Resolute

All of us at Resolute offer you our best wishes for a safe holiday season, and a healthy and prosperous 2020!

In this year’s holiday greeting, we are featuring the black-capped chickadee, native to the boreal forest and other tree-covered areas throughout Canada.

What can we learn from chickadees?

The black-capped chickadee easily adapts to any environment – even boreal winters! To survive in northern climates, the chickadee roosts in dense evergreens to shelter against the elements, lowers its body temperature to conserve energy, and lifts its feathers to trap warm air close to its body.

Chickadees are among the most social, curious and resourceful birds on earth. When food is abundant, it carefully hides morsels all over its territory. Because insects make up a large portion of the chickadee’s summer diet, these birds are important in controlling insect populations.

In the 1950s, a close cousin of the chickadee actually figured out how to pierce the caps of sealed milk bottles left on doorsteps by milkmen, allowing it to get to the milk. Thanks to their social and communicative nature, the birds shared this knowledge, and soon an estimated one million chickadees in Europe had learned how to open milk bottles. According to research by Allan Wilson (Berkeley University) and Kevin Laland (University of St. Andrews), the phenomenon demonstrates these amazing birds’ capacity to communicate with each other, their ability to adopt new behaviors, and their tendency to evolve as a group rather than remaining isolated.

Remarkably, even birds share Resolute’s “succeed together” value! Teamwork starts with a winning attitude and a true desire to support each other by welcoming ideas, communicating frequently and sharing best practices.