By Rebecca Young
Guest Columnist
February can be the least glamorous time of year. Winter feels stale, spring feels distant. You’re tired of working on your new year’s resolutions but it’s too soon to give up. There aren’t any major holidays until Easter or Fourth of July!
I have often found it harder to be excited about going outside in February and have at times felt there was nothing very worth seeing out there. But this is a great time of year to go birding.
Birding, or bird watching, is an increasingly popular habit among Americans, with many more joining the hobby during the pandemic as a chance to get outside and spend some time in nature.
It’s easy, cheap, and can be done anywhere. You can even do it right out your windows, no binoculars or hiking boots needed. And bird books can often be found at libraries or used books stores.
Brown County has many lovely birds, and the local parks and preserves have good wetlands to see ducks and swans on migration, nesting eagles, or elusive woodpeckers. But today I want especially to talk about sparrows.
Sparrows are often overlooked in an avian world filled with colorful warblers, imposing hawks, and graceful herons. But many of them are only here in Brown County with us in the winter months, and like the winter squashes, the winter sparrows are a delight for their beauty, reliability, and seasonality.
One of our most common winter sparrows doesn’t look much like other sparrows. The dark-eyed junco or snowbird is dark gray above and white below, and only the juveniles look streaky, brownish, and more traditionally “sparrow-y.”
These simple birds turn out to be extremely genetically diverse and scientists have gone back and forth over many years deciding on whether they are multiple species or subspecies.
They are often eating on the ground and doing a little dance that their fans call the ”junco shuffle.”
White-throated sparrows are another common winter visitor, but these are a very traditional style of sparrow. They’re most notable for their white throats, like they’re wearing a 19th century cravat, and for their black-and-white striped head with small gold flecks by the eyes.
While juncos can puff up with the best of them, white-throats always seem a bit puffier to me. With their necks tucked in and their body feathers fluffed they look very much like what the internet fondly calls a “birb.” If you’ve watched them for a while you may notice that some of them “pop” more than others. You’re not wrong: these birds come in two color variations or morphs: regardless of sex each bird is either a tan morph or a white morph. The variations persist because they tend to mate with a partner of the opposite morph.
Fox sparrows are often confused with song sparrows, but these charmers are one of our largest sparrows, so if you think the sparrow is redder and chunkier than you’re expecting, you may have a fox sparrow!
We also get song sparrows all year long while fox sparrows are winter friends only. Fox sparrows are named for their reddish coloration, and their heads have several large gray markings. Song sparrows have a more whitish base with darker stripes and a bracket of triangle spots around their throats that make me think of a very dapper set of muttonchops.
All these sparrows often flock together and with birds of other species, like chickadees and finches. So if an individual is confusing, his friends may not tell you exactly what he is, but they can act as useful side-by-side comparisons.
One of the marvelous things about sparrows that they can often be seen under feeders or perched near houses. Although many sparrows look quite similar, bird watching is something that rewards slow contemplation of your surroundings.
When I was a child, my parents played a game with us where they covered a cookie sheet with random household items and then draped a cloth over the top. You were allowed to look at the cookie sheet for a minute or so, and then could win points by remembering as many of the items as possible once they were again hidden.
This now seems to me exactly like birding. You scrutinize the bird for as long as possible, trying to memorize things that may make it distinct: pink legs, a white ring around its eye, a notched tail, and then once it has departed you flip through the pages of the book trying to identify your mysterious visitor. Each bird is a flash card and the more you practice, the more you’ll remember the most relevant field marks.
Before you know it, it’s March, the days are longer and brighter, and you’ll be waiting for your winter sparrows to come back again.
Rebecca Young is descended from some of the original land grant settlers of Brown County and has in the county on and off for four to five years. She comes back often to visit her parents who are Brown County residents. Young is a Phd biologist who spent about 15 years working with birds in Indiana, Kentucky, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, North Dakota, Mexico and more. She also studied physiology and ecology, and has published scientific papers and book chapters. Send comments to [email protected].
