first of the year song sparrow singing outside my kitchen window this morning, maybe it’s all worth it actually
The kind of quality birb content I come here for.
Also, noting that in biogeographically obsessive terms this might imply that the esteemed @stinkyofficial lives in the orange part of the map:
I guess it’s also possible they live in the purple. But I live in the purple, and at least around here you can hear song sparrows singing year-round. Though it’s true they get more insistent about it (if you can call it insistence to foist beauty on a hitherto-less-beautiful world) when the spring kicks in, so maybe that’s what they mean.
In a fun bit of synchronicity, today I specifically set out to try to see greater scaups. They’re pretty rare around here, and for various reasons I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with them for years. I’ve tended to see them only when a better birder was on hand to point out the differences between the lots of lessers we routinely get and the much smaller number of greaters that are sometimes sprinkled amongst them. But that sort of sloth will not cut it when the competition has displaced me from the top ranks of the county-year listers, so this morning I set out to see if I could pick out the couple of female greaters that have been hanging out with the lesser flock on UCSB’s campus lagoon.
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):
Ooh! I knew about the two morphs, but I didn’t know that they tended to pair up in opposite morphs! The one I saw was white-striped, but there was another bird I didn’t see well enough to identify that could’ve been a tan-striped one. Do pairs stick together in the winter?
I don’t think the pairs necessarily stick together in winter. According to Birds of the World they form loose flocks in the winter, then pair up in the spring. On the other hand, the only time I ever saw two together (on the Franklin Trail above Carpinteria on December 21, 2019) it was a tan-striped and a white-striped individual, which made me wonder the same thing.
There have been a bunch of studies of the genetics and behavior of the two morphs. An excerpt from the Birds of the World article:
In general, WS males are more conspicuous, sing more, are more aggressive, and provide less care to their young than do TS males, WS females, and TS females. They occasionally attempt polygyny and are more active than TS males in seeking extra-pair copulations (EPCs)). TS males spend more time mate-guarding than WS males and invest heavily in parental care. Thus WS and TS males exhibit alternative reproductive strategies (Knapton and Falls 1983, Tuttle 1993, Tuttle 2003). TS females are the least likely to exhibit territorial behavior, and provide the most care to their young. Unlike TS females, WS females sing and contribute to territory defense before incubation begins. Territorial and parental performance of WS females and TS males is similar, intermediate to that of WS males and TS females (Kopachena and Falls 1993a).
So if you think of territoriality and aggression as “male” characteristics, and caring for young as a “female” characteristic, it sounds like White-throated Sparrows form pairs of two different types: “extra” pairs where the WS male is relatively aggressive and the TS female is relatively nurturing, and “mellow” pairs where the TS male and the WS female are closer together in terms of those traits. But apparently both arrangements work okay.
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):
