I’ve always liked sparrows a lot, despite (or perhaps because?) my fourth grade grammar teacher Mrs. West said that sparrows were "the laziest birds," feeding opportunistically on whatever humans leave behind. I wanted to ask her why this meant the birds were “lazy”--it seemed to me that they were just taking advantage of messy humans and cleaning up after us. What’s lazy about that? Besides, sparrows are cute. I didn’t say anything aloud, however. I wasn’t much of a class talker when I was a kid, especially not in that class. She was a nice enough lady, and I really dug the way she always had a handbag and shoes to match every outfit. My favorite was this white cotton dress with pictures of little carrots on it, with matching orange pumps and orange handbag. Who has a dress with carrots on it, you know? But what kept me quiet was the fact that she was really tall and intimidating, and I was so small. She would constantly tease me about getting blown away by the wind on the playground (I was maybe three feet tall in fourth grade--maybe--I was little). This idea terrified me, so I wasn’t about to knock her theory on sparrows.
Anyway, I had a lot of sparrows at the feeders today, so I thought I’d do a little photographic study of them and try to learn more about their behavior and their markings. My sources, once I came back inside, were my Stokes’ field guide, my old Peterson’s field guide, Bill Thompson III’s Identify Yourself (Jimmy Carter did a blurb on the back? wow!), and Robert Burton and Stephen W. Kress’s The Audubon Backyard Birdwatcher: Birdfeeders and Bird Gardens.
Okay--I’ll build my confidence with an easy ID: one of the more common sparrows in my backyard, the white-throated sparrow:
I tried to capture the markings on their crowns and napes, which are quite striking:
And is this the cutest little bird booty you’ve ever seen?
So--no challenge there; that white throat patch and the yellow eyebrows make this the easiest sparrow ID for me.
White-crowned sparrows are also easy, but I didn’t see any today. Suffice it to say, I’m good on this sparrow.
Song sparrows are fairly easy to identify with that “stick pin” spot and streaky breast and flanks. Bill of the Birds wrote that a few sparrows have that center “stick pin” spot, so watch out for that. Still, I’m confident that I can spot a song sparrow. Here’s a couple of shots of an individual on the feeder:
Here, you can see the streaked flanks and the long tail:
So far, so good.
Next comes the American tree sparrow. I thought I was pretty good with this one, but after staring at my photos and my many field guides and bird books, I started to get a little shaky! Always over-analyzing everything. Still, I feel fairly confident about these, with their rufous crowns, gray breasts, and light breast spots:
During my post-photo-shoot study, I learned that tree sparrows have what the Stokes call a “two-toned bill--upper bill dark, lower bill yellow.” Once I’d read that, I went back to the previous photos--I think I see the dark upper and yellow lower, but today’s shots were all taken with the Nikon CP4800 on full digital zoom, through the window glass on the back porch--zooming in on their beaks just gives me a pixelated mess. So I went back through my 168 photos again, and I found some other shots where I think you can see the bill fairly well:
Jackpot--check out that dark upper bill and light (if not really yellow in this overcast daylight) lower bill!
So--three sparrows that are regular visitors to my feeders, plus the white-crowned sparrow. Of course, these are winter markings; will things look different in the spring?
Probably the neatest thing sparrows do is the way they kind scrape both feet back to pull grass out of the way to find seeds. Smart birds. And those pink feet just kill me--so cute.
There were a few other birds out there today, so I’ll show you these photos as well.
Here’s the downy performing some acrobatics on the hanging feeder:
Also in that last shot is another streaky bird I see a lot of: the female house finch. It took me a while to tell her from sparrows because she’s got that little-brown-bird-with-streaks thing going. Her body shape is different, however, and her beak is obviously finch-like. When closed, her wing feathers are really pretty from the back:
That last one features a blurry phantasm of a sparrow on its way to the hanging feeder--ghost bird!
I didn’t know that sparrows liked suet, but they do:
But now that I think about it, sparrows will eat just about anything, I guess. That suet's probably better than the french fries, pizza crusts, and other human litter they clean up.
I keep saying I’ve got to snap off some of the twigs around the suet feeder; it's messing up my shots of the feeder. Here, I’ve got great focus on the twigs, with a rather blurry background of a red-bellied woodpecker:
and this shot of a bluejay would’ve been nice, if you could see his face:
Strangely absent today were my cardinal pairs, male house finches, goldfinches, and white-crowned sparrows. I saw a couple of juncos, so that was nice--but I didn’t get any photos. I picked dark-eyed juncos as one of my top 10 most beautiful birds; they’re just so cute!
I think my favorite photos are the ones where the bird just doesn’t cooperate; one second he’s there, the next second, I get a photo of
Nice twigs.
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