Our birds: Sparrows

We’ve seen these only occasionally. I hope to get a better photo of it sometime.

I think I have the right ID even though I didn’t manage to get its picture.

We don’t often see this pretty little bird, but we’re always happy when we do. Sparrows in general are handsome birds.

The house sparrow (which actually is NOT a true sparrow) gives sparrows a bad name!

The song sparrow does indeed serenade us with song.

It’s heartbreaking to see it raise the large cowbird babies instead of its own year after year. It must have fewer defenses against cowbirds than other birds. She runs herself ragged trying to feed these hungry usurpers.

We first saw this in 2022 (or maybe it has been here before and we just noticed it then).

Even though we were about 20 feet away, there was something that seemed different from other sparrows.

Kudos to the Merlin app for ID’ing it for us!

We have two or three of these around fall, winter, and spring. I enjoy watching them do their little dance to get insects out of the soil.

This bird visits only as it’s passing through in the spring and fall. I love its pure white stripes on its head and its uniformly gray breast. It’s a little bigger than other sparrows — a really handsome bird. They seem to eat only on the ground. They wait for things to drop from the feeder overhead, then eat the little bits of suet and seeds. Of course, they also traveled around the yard getting all sorts of things to eat — probably bugs and seeds.

At first I couldn’t figure out what this bird was. It turns out that it’s the immature form of the white-crowned sparrow. Quite often the female or immature forms of birds puzzle me.

We have a small flock of these “snowbirds” each winter. They look like someone just dipped their bottom half (horizontally) into snow, just as you’d dip an Easter egg into food dye. They hang around until late spring. This one is enjoying a bath in the wildlife pond. It shows their vertical white stripes on the tail, an easy way to identify them when they’re flying around the yard.

Like other sparrows, they seem to prefer eating on the ground. This one is feasting on the seeds that are leftover from last year’s grasses. They’re especially abundant where I’ve been cleaning out the previous season’s from last year.