Here's How to Go Sparrow-Spotting
What’s brown and brown and brown all over? What skulks like a cat, camouflages like a chameleon, thrives in all climates and weathers, and is mainly overlooked? What’s our best metaphor for insignificance? It’s the sparrow! Here’s how to go sparrow-spotting—and truly appreciate these common little birds!
The Unassuming Sparrow
It lives in our gravel pits, power-line cuts, bus terminals, and coal mines. Its song is a jingling trill, a gasp, a gurgle, a wheeze, a buzz. It eats spiders in the Atlantic salt marshes, cinquefoil buds on the Alaskan tundra, and seeds from the Mojave prickly pear.
No bird is more unassuming, adaptable, or democratic than the sparrow. This family of birds, known as the Emberizidae, is native to all fifty American states, plus thirteen Canadian provinces and territories, yet has never had a representative elected to the office of State Bird or Provincial Emblem. Why the outrageous neglect?
Little Brown Jobs
What the sparrow has going for it is exactly what people have against it. Scratching in the leaf litter or peeking out of dense grasses, sparrows are shy and blend in beautifully with their surroundings. Most are some shade of brown, with streaky camouflage on the back or breast, and their love of brambly shadows doesn’t make identification any easier. Backyard birders often dismiss them out of hand as “LBJs” or “Little Brown Jobs.” Where does one begin?
The House Sparrow
Try right outside your front door. Sparrows’ great redeeming virtue is their ubiquity, if not their visibility. In the fall, they are migrating past us by the thousands. Chances are, wherever you live, in late October, you may have five to seven species of sparrow hanging out within a five-minute walk of your back porch. If you can find a neglected patch of public park, or a brushy hedgerow beside an open field, you’re in sparrow country.
The first sparrow you are likely to see, if you live in a town, city, village, suburb, or metropolis, is probably the famous (and infamous) House Sparrow. Prepare yourself for this shocking news: The House Sparrow is not related to our other sparrows. At least not our North American Emberizidae. It’s actually more closely related to our finch species! It was introduced from Europe into New York’s Central Park in 1864 and, since then, has spread like wildfire around the continent, taking up residence in chimneys, gutters, window-sills, and attics, just to name a few. The male House Sparrow has a distinctive black throat and bib; the female is a much plainer brown. Once you feel comfortable identifying this species, walk on.
Sparrow-Spotting
Here’s how to go sparrow-spotting. Grab a pair of binoculars and take them to your neighborhood’s brushiest, scrubbiest, raggedest patch of vegetation. Sparrows are usually found at a very human height from the ground, usually six feet or less. Watch for movement. And listen: as sparrows forage for food, they often make a sound like someone trying and failing to strike a match, over and over. You can even train your ear to tell the difference between one type of match and another.
When you see a sparrow, what should you look for? Many sparrows have distinctive patterns around the head, for instance. Does the bird have a rusty red cap? Any white at the throat? Does it have white or brown streaks above the eyes like an old-fashioned football helmet?
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Clarence “Ace” Parker c. 1938 (one of our most Song-Sparrow-like quarterbacks)
Next, see if you can get a look at the pattern on the breast of the bird. Is it streaky or clean? Is there a central “tie-pin” where the streaks converge in the center of the breast? Are the streaks thick and blurry, or thin and fine? Take notes about these characteristics to help you remember what you’ve seen. Back at home, dust off any old field guide to the birds, and see if you can narrow down your humdrum sparrow to a particular species. Once you’ve given it a name and learned a little bit about how it lives, no sparrow seems quite so humdrum.
Hamlet, coming to the end of his own play, paraphrases the New Testament by saying, “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”—meaning, I guess, that there’s significance in the lives of the least of the least of earthly Creation. Surely that’s true. But who picked out the sparrow to be the least of the least of creatures? Can’t we leave that unfortunate title to, oh, I don’t know, woolly aphids?
Catherine Boeckmann
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This was a really well-written, entertaining and sweet article. More pieces by this writer, please!
Adorable! I have a great affection for sparrows (or...finches, as it were), and it stems from my father, who would build all sorts of contraptions to feed and house them. Or maybe it was to attract, feed and house other birds, but the sparrows took over, and I was too young to realize the difference. My dad was the one who planted the 'birder' seed in me. He pointed out that the male sparrows were the ones with the beards. And the rest is history. To this day, sparrows remind me of my father. There's even a particularly crotchety one who noisily dominates the giant maple in the front yard, who makes me laugh. He's so dramatic! He thinks he's so tough. He continually lures other males into chases around the house, knowing he has the little bird house in the front to escape into. He's a crusty bachelor, as far as I can tell. I affectionately call him 'Poppa'. Not that he shares any characteristics with my own pops, lol.
My boyfriend called me one day and said he found a baby sparrow at work. He had disrupted its nest when he was moving pallets with a fork lift and had killed its nest mate. He picked it up and put it aside hoping that the mother would come back for it but never did,
He called me and said he found a baby bird and asked, "Can you make it live?". I admitted I had not had much luck with baby birds but said I would try, Robert came to my house that evening with the baby in a cage his mom had.
"Spanky" he said, "Spanky?" I replied. "Spanky" he said said.
This little thing was just starting to grow feathers and looked kind of grumpy, I went to the store and bought some baby food and found an old eye dropper to feed him with, Spanky had a good appetite and fell asleep when it was dark. I covered his cage with a blanket and hoped for the best. (Overnight is usually when I lost most of my baby birds.)
The next morning I took the blanket off expecting to find Spanky a gonner but to my surprise he opened his eyes and his beak wanting to be fed,
Spanky was with us for two years, He was the best, funniest and most unusual pet in our lives. Spanky wanted to eat whatever I was eating and I would give him a bite, He loved to steal potato chips and wanted to drink anything that was bright colored. Spanky had no fear of our cat, Twink. Spanky would use Twink as a couch, and would ride around on our dog Scout,
Spanky even learned to speak! I knew that many birds would mimic car horns and alarms but to hear a sparrow talk was astonishing! He could say about 15 words or whistles that I used to call for my dog and cat, (Yes, even the cat.) He would call my daughter Miss Beff, which is what I called her and call my son Sky, whose name was Skyler. He called to Scout and did his whistle and called the cat Twink, I was Mom and my boyfriend was Rob.
Spanky was scared to death of the cat laser when he figured out he couldn't catch it. If he was mad at you he would cuss you out in his birdie language and hide in his nest, He took a bath every other day and even had a special dish to bathe in. Spanky rode around on the back of my wheelchair and almost never pooped on me or anything in the house, he used his cage or the very tops of my kitchen cabinets where he liked to hang out and observe what was happening in our home.
Spanky was so loved by Robert and me; he was the child we never had. We cried for days when he escaped, but he was a big boy then and wanted a mate. We would hear him around town calling for Miss Beff or Scout. I hope he found a Mrs. Spanky and had dozens of eggs that hatched.
I never knew that the rufous sided towhee (the bird pictured at the heading of this article) was a sparrow! It's nice to learn something new each day.
Overdue,thanks! I'm lucky enough to work on the Southern Great Plains where I'm often surrounded by some of the most beautiful sparrows around; The Grasshopper Sparrow, Cassin's, Lark Bunting, (all in decline). The Spring migrant Spizellas; Chipping, Brewer's, Clay-colored, and the occasional Field Sparrows.. and the Savannah, and all the "variable" Juncos, the resident Spotted Towhees and the passing Green-tailed Towhees make for some entertaining sunrises. This family and the "peep" sandpipers seem to be the last groups that people learn but are well worth the effort.
Excellent and entertaining writing! More like this please! :)
Interesting! I hope that everyone's weekend was both great and safe,having a good week and has another good weekend,plus I also hope that they had a happy Halloween!Unfortunately, I don't see many Sparrows here in Tennessee where I live.
As a fellow Tennessean i say keep looking! :) Many various sparrow species are currently migrating into our area. Must mean our Northern friends are going to have a tough winter!
Having house sparrows around hardly is cause for celebration. They have become an invasive species, displacing native birds like the black-capped Chickadee. It is just another saga of man messing with nature and creating another catastrophe.
Why so negative? Why not see the beauty and the gift of life in all of God's creation.
