Curious just how bird organizers classify each bird into its spot on the tree? See how a chickadee gets its organization levels.

First off, a chickadee has feathers. That automatically makes it a bird. So in the organization chart, that puts it into this area:

KINGDOM - Animalia (i.e. animals, not plants or bacteria etc)
PHYLUM - Chordata (i.e. with a nervous system)
SUBPHYLUM - Vertebrata (i.e. with a main backbone)
CLASS - Aves (i.e. having feathers)

Next, we come to ORDER. There are about 28 orders of birds. The chickadee is put into the Passeriformes order. This order contains all perching birds. Since chickadees do perch on branches, that is where they belong.

Next is FAMILY. Of the Passeriformes, the chickadee falls into the Paridae family - that is the grouping of titmice, tits, and chickadees. All of these birds are very similar to each other, and quite different from other perching birds.

We're down to GENUS and SPECIES - the two latin names that define a particular bird. The chickadee general genus is Parus. Specific types of chickadee have specific species names. So we have:

Parus atricapillus - black capped chickadee
Parus carolinensis - carolina chickadee
Parus hdsonicus - boreal chickadee

While you could look at these three birds and say "oh that's a chickadee!" if you looked even closer, you could see the differences that makes each species unique.

The Scientific Organization of Birds - the Actual Classification Tree
Scientific Definition of a Bird - General Overview
The Orders of Aves Birds