Once in a rare while, a White-crowned Sparrow spends winter up here, but every one of them breeds far from here. The White-crowned Sparrow’s throat feathers may be whitish, but they don’t have a border setting off the White-throated Sparrow’s defining feature. The White-throated Sparrow has an overall warm, brownish appearance while the White-crowned has a solid gray underside and a cool gray nape. More useful are the White-crowned Sparrow’s pink or yellowish bill rather than the nondescript dark bill of the White-throat and the fact that White-crowned Sparrows don’t have any sign of a yellow lore. Its body shape is different, but you need to spend time with both species before that feature is helpful. One other sparrow has similar black-and-white striping on the head: the White-crowned Sparrow. That’s an interesting story in itself, but because migrating tan-striped birds are found in the same flocks as white-striped birds, identifying them is almost as straightforward as identifying the more boldly marked White-throated Sparrows. All the white-striped birds, male and female both, sing, but only male tan-striped birds sing. When I started birding, I assumed the birds with duller plumage were females, and half of them are, but so are half of the boldly striped birds. The marking between eye and bill is usually much more brilliant yellow in the white-striped than the tan-striped birds, and the white throat on these duller birds isn’t as bold and clearly defined, either. Half of all White-throated Sparrows don’t have the bold black-and-white head pattern but, rather, a much duller, tan-and-off-black pattern. And the next sparrow to grab their attention is very often a White-throat singing that pure, whistled song or showing off its striking markings, the spark prompting many people to reach for a field guide for the very first time. The Old-World House Sparrows may be woven into the fabric of their daily lives, whether they’re hearing them out their bedroom window or tossing French fries to them at fast food restaurants. How had I never once noticed that amazing song, so very easy to hear now that I was aware of it, during any of the 23 springs of my life before I took up birding? I often wonder how many other beautiful things right there in my own world today don’t exist for me because my eyes and ears filter them out of ignorance.Ī lot of people growing up in urban, suburban, or rural areas learn their first sparrows as I did. The next year we were in Chicago for a bit during spring migration and there they were, right in Russ’s parents’ backyard in the very neighborhood where I’d grown up, singing away. Two weeks later, back in Lansing, when I saw some at the feeders in the Fenner Arboretum, I didn’t need a field guide to identify them. Much as I’d always loved House Sparrows, the bold black, white, and yellow markings on my lifer White-throated Sparrow’s head were as striking and memorable as its song. I had to see the bird to count it on my life list, and so Bob led me to the hedge where the song was coming from, and voila! Bob Hinkle said it was a White-throated Sparrow singing Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. We were gathered near the conference center when I heard the most strikingly beautiful bird song imaginable-a pure, whistled song. My favorite instructor at Michigan State University, Bob Hinkle, had brought a group of us graduate students to a naturalists’ conference in Natural Bridge, Virginia. That which we call an American sparrow by any other name would be as sweet.īe that as it may, I remember the exact moment when I fell in love with my first all-American sparrow, on April 12, 1975. If taxonomists were at all consistent in applying nomenclature rules, they’d have come up with a different name for our American sparrows. When I became a birder, I was shocked in reading my first field guides to learn that American ornithologists didn’t consider them sparrows at all-both the Golden and Peterson guides said House Sparrows belonged to a family called “weaver finches.” Current taxonomists have taken them out of that family, putting them into a smaller family of “Old World sparrows.” That’s fitting-the English word sparrow had been used for centuries in reference to the Eurasian and African birds called by that name in even the oldest English translations of the Bible. I could never have dreamed that the ancestors of these confiding, cheerful little creatures had been ripped from their native lands in Europe and Asia and released in ecosystems here that weren’t prepared for them, leading to so much death and destruction to bluebirds, Purple Martins, and other American birds. I’ve always had an affinity for sparrows, starting with the House Sparrows that cheeped outside my window when I was a very small child, telling one another about their day’s adventures.
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