An acrobatic flier with a dashing white eye-stripe, the Mountain chickadee is a common year-round resident of Oregon's high-elevation coniferous and mixed forests. This species is distinguished from other North American chickadees by its white eyebrow, gray flanks, and gray undertail coverts and by its drawling, hoarse-sounding chick-a-dee-dee-de call.
It is resident in all types of forests from two to 10 miles west of the Cascades summit and east, in the Blue, Siskiyou, Wallowa and Warner mountains and on Hart, Steens and other isolated mountains east of the Cascades.