The single most prominent event in the backyard birding almanac is the arrival of our winter sparrows. No other migratory birds are so abundant and so easily attracted to feeding stations and human habitation in general. The most common are the two crowned sparrows, the golden-crowned sparrow and the white-crowned sparrow, who typically first appear in mid-September and then increase in numbers over the course of October. These two birds’ namesake crowns easily exonerate them from the common prejudice that holds that sparrows are undifferentiable little brown birds. They are also the most prominent singers of early fall, when most resident birds have fallen silent – listen to their songs below and then keep your ears open on a fall walk around the neighborhood.
Three other species of note arrive in fall: the uncommon but regular white-throated sparrow, the big scratcher among dense understories the fox sparrow, and the modest and retiring Lincoln’s sparrow of wetland edges. All of these birds will remain with us until they commence the journey back to their northern breeding grounds in April. Some of our year-round sparrows, notably the song sparrow and the dark-eyed junco, also increase in number significantly during the winter months when residents are joined by northern migrants.
Attracting the Winter Sparrows
Some of the winter sparrows are common yard birds, some are uncommon yard birds, and some are found primarily in wild natural habitats rather than residential areas. If present, however, any can be readily attracted to a feeding station. All of these sparrows enjoy the common birdfeeding seeds such as sunflower (especially shelled sunflower) and white millet. In general, these birds prefer feeding on the ground or from a broad platform rather than from hanging feeders with narrow perches, but they will do what they have to do for delicious seeds! White-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, by far the most common in backyards, will even cling tenaciously to hanging suet feeders, though they may not appear particularly comfortable in such positions.
Golden-crowned Sparrow
Identify: Generally easy to identify – only this sparrow has a golden crown – but note that they may change in appearance over the course of the season: their normal winter plumage shows only a dull yellow patch (as in the photo below), while their breeding plumage shown upon arrival or before departing features a thick black eyebrow and bright yellow crown (as in the comic and video).
Get acquainted: Our two crowned sparrows (this bird and the following white-crowned sparrow) are by far the most ubiquitous of this convenient bundle of winter sparrows. As their names suggest, the two species are close cousins, both standing out as large sparrows of similar shape, with unstreaked breasts, and similar habitat preferences of open weedy areas, scrubby plant communities, and backyards. Since they share a lot of habits and habitat, it is sometimes convenient to be able to refer to both of these two birds collectively: feel free to refer to the “crowned sparrows” or, if you want to speak in birder jargon, to “zonos” (short for their shared genus, Zonotrichia). Golden-crowned sparrows arrive here in September from their Alaskan nesting grounds, for which they will head out again in April or early May.
Upon arrival in fall, golden-crowns announce their presence with their highly distinctive song of three clear, high, whistled notes descending in pitch (they will often sing only the first two notes). The classic representation of this song is “oh-dear-me,” but other mnemonics of similarly pathetic and suitably minor-key connotation include “I’m-so-tired” and “no-gold-here” (the mocking refrain heard by despondent Yukon gold miners).
This is the song we are asked to identify more often than any other local bird sound: by fall our local nesters have largely fallen silent, making the songs of the newly arrived crowned sparrows stand out as the most musical voices in a much diminished soundscape. The cacophony of spring can deafen us to individual voices, but in fall even people little accustomed to listening to birds will find themselves stepping outside and wondering “what bird is that?” Once they’ve settled in to their California quarters, golden-crowns sing less, but will continue to do so intermittently throughout the winter months, especially after before or after rain (“rain bird” is one old informal country name for them), and then more frequently again before their spring departure.
White-crowned Sparrow
Identify: The second of our two main winter sparrows. Usually easily identified by their bold black and white head stripes, but beware a frequent source of confusion: younger, “first winter” birds have brown and tan stripes rather than black and white. All white-crowns have rather yellow-orange beaks compared to the dull beaks of the similarly sized golden-crowned sparrows.
Get acquainted: Were it not for the unmistakable prominence of the gold-crowns’ fall songs, the white-crowns’ musical contributions might well be remarked on more often. Like their golden-crowned brethren, white-crowns often sing upon arriving here in fall, fresh from the nesting grounds. Their song starts with a similar high clear whistle, but only one: after the introductory whistle comes a variable jumble of fast notes with generally downward trend.
While some bird species can wander a bit in winter compared to the essentially universal habit of maintaining a territory during the nesting season, winter flocks of crowned sparrows stay within a small, definite area to which they return each year – those are the same birds that left your yard for a long road trip five months ago. Considering that these birds weigh something less than an ounce, nest from the Pacific Northwest up into Alaska, and make a yearly journey of some thousands of miles to be with you, sometimes taking up to a month or so of 70-mile-per-day self-powered travel – they deserve a warm welcome on their return. Treat them well, give them some seed or suet or mealworms, and don’t begrudge them the new shoots from your flower and vegetable gardens that they love to eat before they take off in spring.
I should note that while white-crowns are distinctly winter-only birds in Novato and other inland areas, we do actually have a separate, resident, non-migratory population along the immediate coast. These specialists of the fog belt live in the plant community called coastal scrub, where they shelter among the coyote bush and big lupines and coffeeberry and so on. They have been intensively studied, including major contributions by the organization formerly known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, who made a wide variety of interesting discoveries. One of the headliners was the realization that these coastal sparrows are so insular in their little tribes that six different dialects of song exist in Point Reyes alone according to distinct geographic zones.
Minor Members of the Winter Sparrow Brigade
White-throated Sparrow
The white-throated sparrow is the third of the world’s five members of the Zonotrichia genus, much the same in size, shape, and habits as its crowned cousins. White-throats are, however, a predominately eastern bird, with only a small, disconnected, and much lower density population that winters on the Pacific coast. In our area, you will most often find them as single birds joining in with larger groups of white-crowned sparrows.
Identification is usually simple: they do indeed have a prominent white throat, as well as a yellow spot on the lores (in front of the eyes). There is one potentially tricky and very interesting aspect of white-throated plumage, which is that these birds exist in two different and genetically distinct forms, a “white-striped” and a “tan-striped.” White-striped birds are usually more aggressive, and birds usually mate with a bird of the opposite stripe color. Rather odd – imagine if people came out either as redheads or with black hair, and then were ineluctably drawn to pair with those of the opposite hair color.
Fox Sparrow
This species is probably the third most abundant of the winter sparrows, after the two crowned sparrows, but is more restricted in its habitat preferences. Foxies generally favor areas with a relatively dense understory in which they can take refuge and with a thicker layer of leaf litter and plant material upon which they can exercise their particular talent of double-footed kick-scratching. No local bird except the spotted towhee can rival them for the forcefulness and noisiness of their scruffling (note that this video shows a different, red race and not our local “sooty” race):
Appropriate habitats for these conditions include chaparral, wooded areas, and yards with low shrubs and pleasantly unkempt base layers full of unseen tasty morsels waiting to be uncovered. Still, even in the most disheveled of yards, you are unlikely to attract more than one or two fox sparrows – they are not so numerous as the ubiquitously flocking crowned sparrows. When you do see one, you can recognize them by their plain brown back, densely marked breast, and large size (they are the largest of all our sparrows). Images in field guides may be somewhat confusing since fox sparrows are one of the most geographically diverse species, with some 18 different subspecies across four different groups of clearly differentiated appearance: almost all of our birds belong to the “sooty” race.
Lincoln’s Sparrow
Seldom seen by backyard birders, this neat little sparrow is most readily found here near wetlands such as those found at Rush Creek, Bahia, Hamilton, and Las Gallinas. They are cousins to the song sparrow, the most typical and year-round resident of the marshes, and often overlap with them in distribution, but overall Lincoln’s sparrows are not quite so bound to the water and move more into upland habitats. Like the song sparrow, Lincoln’s are small and compact (distinctly smaller than crowned and fox sparrows) and are streaky on the front (unlike the unstreaked crowned sparrows). But where our song sparrows are the smudgy, rustic bumpkins of the Melospiza genus, Lincoln’s sparrows are much tidier and subtly elegant, with faint and delicate streaking on a clean, buffy tan breast. I like them.
Who was Lincoln? Not the president, but one Thomas Lincoln, a companion of Audubon who happened to be wielding the gun that slew the first of the species in the name of science, providing the specimen for Audubon to illustrate and name. (As he later reminisced, Audubon was “a nice man, but as Frenchy as thunder.”) That particular sparrow might justifiably be a bit peeved at this method of bestowing a name upon him and all his kin throughout posterity, but such was the way of things on the taxonomic frontiers. Young Tom Lincoln was no scientist, no great lover and patron of his namesake sparrows, and as far as anyone now knows no particularly notable man in any respect – but it is his name we now employ. Feel free to mentally reattribute the bird to the Lincoln of your choice.
Header image: First winter white-crowned sparrow by Nicole Beaulac
Once again, an excellent, very helpful piece – thanks, Jack!
A sparrow that looks like a white throated Sparrow but has yellow on its throat and yellow on the shoulder of its wings what is it