Chickadee is a community platform for sharing ideas and feedback related to James Newcomb's forthcoming book, The Pelican Code: Bringing Nature's Deep-Time Wisdom into Our Lives. (I know, we're already two birds deep and we're still in the first paragraph, but hold on to your hats!) The book's narrative weaves personal experience, science, some small adventures, and reflections on our connections with nature.
Chickadee allows you to quickly and easily react to draft chapters of the book by having a short conversation with an AI agent via your phone. Your thoughts are then summarized and made available to you and others sharing the platform. Based on where the conversation goes, new topics may emerge as our community dialogue unfolds.
This process answers to one of James' goals for the book, which is to actively integrate what we learn from nature into our lives. Chickadees are intelligent, highly social birds who communicate and process information, like the threats posed by predators, collectively. This is a form of collective cognition. We humans do the same all the time, but it helps to have tools that can help to support and organize our conversation so that we can go further, together.
James' aspiration behind Chickadee is to set his ideas free rather than bind them to the book. Today, we need connection with the more-than-human world more than ever, and we can support one another's engagement with nature by putting our minds together, just as the chickadees do.
Chickadee is invitation-only. If James sent you a link, use that one and you'll be in right away. Otherwise James will let you in shortly.
Did you know?
Excerpts from the book
The more “dees” in a chickadee's call, the greater the threat warning.
Chickadees have one of the most sophisticated threat-communication systems known among songbirds. Chickadees' warning calls have been shown to distinguish whether a predator is perched or moving, near or far, as well as differentiating various predator types. Their social responses are highly coordinated and rely on graded, information-rich calls. Their well-known “chick-a-dee” call is not a fixed sound but a graded alarm system according to which the number and structure of the “dee” syllables vary systematically with the level and type of danger. The greater the number of dees, the higher the threat level. Researchers report hearing chickadee calls with more than 20 dees…
The threat level of a situation, and the appropriate response to it, emerge from the collective processing of the group: a dynamic, interwoven field of perception and action spanning species boundaries.
Chapter 2
Chickadees are experts in surviving disruption.
Chickadees have verifiable evolutionary bona fides when it comes to surviving disruption. The spectacular rise of Homo sapiens began only around 300,000 years ago, when our species emerged within the genus Homo. Chickadees, on the other hand, are part of the genus Poecile, that diversified around 6 million years ago from the family of Paridae… Chickadees have millions of years more experience living on this changing planet than humans do.
During the Holocene, the period of the last 11,700 years in which humans have taken over much of the earth and built our complex systems and societies, global average temperatures have varied only about as much as the normal variation in human body temperatures: just 0.5–1.0° C. By comparison, over the past 6–15 million years that chickadees and their kin have been flying and hopping around, global temperatures have varied ten times as much, 10–15° C. These birds have experienced global glacial-interglacial cycles, sea levels 10–20 meters higher than today, and deep structural changes in ecosystem and climate regimes.
Chapter 2
Bumblebees can learn and teach sequences to open puzzle boxes.
In bumblebees, behavioral studies have shown that members of Bombus terrestris have capacities for social learning, behavioral traditions, and potentially even cumulative culture whereby cultural traits grow more complex over time. In laboratory experiments, untrained bees paired with human-trained demonstrator bees learned to open puzzle boxes holding a sugar reward by watching the other bee's actions. When researchers seeded a colony with a demonstrator bee trained in one of two possible methods for opening a box, that technique spread to other bees in the colony. Even if a bee later stumbled upon the alternative method, she would still actively stick to the method taught by her hive-mates. More strikingly still, a 2024 study showed that bumblebees don't just copy simple actions; they can learn a complex two-step recipe from others that they could not figure out on their own.
Chapter 3
