The delightful Grasshopper Sparrow is often seen during breeding season singing atop partially exposed stems or on fences. Wild oats and purple needlegrass are among the many species that make up the swaying golden fields these guys call home!
There are three more illustrations in this series showing different habitats of Big Sur. 😊
I’ve set my alarm for 3 a.m.; hopefully by the time this posts I’ll be asleep.
There’s a really neat beach that I’ve never been to. I was planning to try to get there this weekend, but we’re traveling on Sunday, which means I’d need to go Saturday. And at this point I can’t not participate in the local protest, even though it will probably be small, even though my own contribution will be pathetic and inadequate.
So I’ve decided to use a day of PTO and go tomorrow instead, spend some time by myself with just the wind and the grass, a few cows. And the birds.
I’m hoping for Grasshopper Sparrows. I’d never seen them IRL until this year, when I found out you can see them in SBA; you just have to work for them.
The song of a Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) was clearly audible today at a Hickory Hills Park grassland. Its reluctance to leave the area is a good indication that it may be nesting.
The population of these sparrows has declined dramatically over the last fifty years. The foremost cause for this decline is a loss of habitat, as well as the fragmenting and degrading of grasslands.
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Brad Hacker (local geology professor and impressively obsessive birder) reported one of these at Ellwood Mesa in Santa Barbara yesterday. I’d never seen one before (not just this year; ever). Brad included specific coordinates where the bird was singing, so I stopped by on my way back from seeing the Fulvous Whistling-Duck to see if he would still be there.
And he was! I got a recording of him singing (along with a House Finch; it’s hard to make a bird recording anywhere in the U.S. without including a House Finch), and a crappy digiscoped photo:
The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus) was recently featured on the cover of Audubon Magazine. This sparrow is on the brink of extinction and likely will be extinct in the wild in the next year or two. There is currently a captive breeding program that is successfully breeding the sparrows but it is unknown is they will ever be able to reintroduce them back into the wild. The sparrow requires dry palmetto prairie, an ecosystem found only in South-Central Florida that has been decimated by human development. I saw these two individuals in 2015 at Three Lakes WMA. I spent many early mornings on the prairies of Central Florida listening for the buzzing call of the grasshopper sparrow without much luck. On one outing I stumbled across biologists who were surveying the population and with them caught my first glimpse of a small blur on an expansive landscape. I returned to the same spot a month later and sat quietly in the burnt grass and palmetto as the sun peaked over the horizon. l was luckily enough to see two males perch and sing their song that announces their territory. That experience will probably be the last one I have with the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow.
