Sooty fox sparrows absolutely make it as far south as you. They make it as far south as me! Second while I check the NatGeo field guide. I don’t like its illustrations as much as Sibley’s, and so I only rarely consult it, but it is hands down the best at laying out geographic boundaries of subspecies, which Sibley treats only vaguely.
Okay. Here you go:
So the breeding ranges are separate, but you’ve definitely got Sooties in winter. And yeah, what you describe certainly sounds good for fox sparrow.
I’m so glad you’re enjoying the new binoculars! And while I can’t speak for the rest of your followers, I’m a big fan of your birdwatching content.
Well, this Tumblr is definitely becoming not just a birdwatching blog but an ask-@lies-about-the-bird blog! So I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
Those maps are good, much more helpful than anything I found in my various bird books. It sounds like fox sparrow is very likely, especially since they’ve been seen there recently by other people. I’ll edit my list. If it’s correct, that means I saw two new (to me) sparrows in one outing!
Neat! Yeah, I didn’t talk about the White-throated Sparrow you mentioned, but that’s a bird I’m always excited to see. They’re pretty common in the eastern part of the US, but out west they’re few and far between. They’re one of the species I read about in eastern-oriented field guides and natural history books as I was growing up that I never got to see myself, so when I do see one it feels like a celebrity sighting.
One of the cool things I’ve learned about them lately is that they occur in tan-striped and white-striped versions, where the morphs are not sex- or age-specific; they’re born as one or the other. But… pairs of them tend to be mixed-morph (tan-striped birds tend to mate with white-striped birds). Which seems really interesting, and I’m curious what it means.
Here’s a tan-striped bird I saw in 2020 at Aliso Park in northeast Santa Barbara county:
Here’s a white-striped bird I saw in 2021 in Carpinteria (on the right, with an immature White-crowned Sparrow on the left):
This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, February 9th, 2022 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Tumblr.
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