Fall comes and days grow shorter. The black oak leaves turn yellow and the birds no longer sing. September fades into October and even the most enthusiastic musicians, mockingbirds and goldfinches, give only rare and intermittent bursts of melody. But then one morning a clear, high fluting rings out, three sweet whistles in a dying fall. The crowned sparrows have returned.
There are two of them, the golden-crowned and the white-crowned sparrow, and both have songs characterized by those distinct high whistles, notes that are unusually clear and single-pitched, and so more like human music than most birdsong. In the golden-crowned sparrow, the typical pattern consists of three descending notes (“oh dear me” or “I’m so tired”), though you will often hear only two, or an alternate pattern that descends to the second note before rising to the third. In white-crowned sparrows, a basic theme runs through numerous variations: a single clear introductory whistle, followed by an assortment of buzzes and trills.
Soon enough you’ll see them, these two large sparrows that feed in flocks on the relatively open ground of parks, lawns, and roadsides. The basics of crowned sparrow identification are simple: if a sparrow has a golden crown, it’s a golden-crowned sparrow and if a sparrow has head stripes of crisp black and white, it’s a white-crowned sparrow. Both species like to have some nearby cover to retreat to should any danger threaten, but often hop out into exposed areas as they search for fallen seeds, a smattering of insects, and fresh new plant growth once rain arrives.
What are sparrows? The popular prejudice is that they are a group of mundane and indistinguishable little brown birds. More accurately, we could note that are a family of modestly-sized songbirds adapted to eating seeds and feeding on the ground, whose members are often migratory, social in winter, and musical in spring. All of these traits have their exceptions among the family, but all are applicable to the two crowned sparrows. Overall, they are fitting representatives of the larger tribe, with their greatest exceptionality being their vibrant repudiation of that dismissive “indistinguishable.” After all, they wear crowns, the right word for the colors on their high-held and singing heads.
Now they’ve flown through the night for hundreds of miles, having set their course by the stars and by an inner compass. In the early morning light, they sensed that they were near the unforgotten place, and looked for the hills and trees that marked last winter’s refuge. And now above the mundane autumn chatter of the woodpeckers and crows, I hear them pour that pensiveness distilled, the refined and wild silver of their not-quite-ended tundra music.
They have a journey in them
To the migrating bird something speaks out from the earth or sky with directions to guide its journey.
– Bird Migration, Donald R. Griffin
Once you recognize these two sparrows by sight (the crowns), sound (songs that begin with high, drawn-out whistles), and behavior (ground-feeding flocks), you will discover them to be ubiquitous components of the autumn landscape, appearing in late September, becoming numerous in October, and remaining so until April and May, during which months they gradually depart. This is a fundamental thing to be aware of: the crowned sparrows are winter visitors, migrants who arrive in autumn. So are most ducks and shorebirds and a diverse array of songbirds, but we have no other winter birds that are such integral companions in our yards and daily lives. The crowned sparrows announce fall’s arrival more clearly than any other voices.
We do have a resident population of white-crowned sparrows that lives along the immediate coast and doesn’t migrate. You can see them in Point Reyes or the Headlands, but not in Novato or San Rafael or anywhere at all inland. (California also has migratory breeding white-crowns in the far north and in the Sierras.) But the majority of our white-crowns are migrants of a moderate distance that nest from far northern California to British Columbia, with a smattering of more orange-beaked birds belonging to a more northerly subspecies that nests in Canada and Alaska. All of our golden-crowns are definitively northerners, nesting in high latitude thickets of willows and alders. On average, the golden-crowns seem to prefer winter habitats that echo that association, favoring slightly wetter areas with denser cover than the white-crowns, though they will often flock loosely together.
Practically speaking, travelling hundreds or thousands of miles is hard and dangerous, so there must be substantial advantages. Migration allows birds to take advantage of seasonally abundant food (seeds, green plant growth, insects), as well as reduced competition for nesting sites and lower abundance of predators. If they stayed put all year round, one or all of these factors would cap populations at a lower level, levels which they are able to exceed by seasonal movement. Go to Alaska from June through August and you’ll find a relatively uncrowded landscape, with sufficient food to go around and fewer predators to worry about.
Long-distance travel is of course comparatively easier when you can fly. Even a small bird like a crowned sparrow is a tremendously efficient traveler, capable of steadily covering some 60 miles or more in each night’s flight, or up to 300 miles on a night of ideal conditions. The physiological preparation that makes this possible is invisible to a casual human eye, but is proportionately astounding. We can measure it, if we look closely: when daylight hits a certain length, certain hormones are activated and a number of biological and behavioral changes result. Suddenly they start gaining weight: in a week they’ve increased their mass by 25% or more. A quarter of an ounce might fuel a 100-mile flight.
Think of the journey. A five-nickel-weight sparrow flies 2000 miles from Alaska to California. They fly through the night, thousands of feet up in the cold, thin air, hour after hour of pumping wings. We think of birds as small and fragile, and in certain contexts they are. But it is easy to forget the ounce-for-ounce durability of birds, which in many ways far exceeds our own.
And think of the magnetism, the fidelity to specific locations in both spring and fall that does not simply push them southward, but that draws them here, to your very yard or this stretch of roadside. Each bird is alone and undertakes her journey without tools or teachers. The night sky provides the clearest orientation: they are born knowing the stars. But many birds can migrate even on cloudy nights because they can see things we cannot: many birds, crowned sparrows included, have magnetically sensitive particles in their brain, an inner compass that always points the way to go. As they draw near their final destination, they search and find the visible landmarks they remember, that will guide them to their winter home.
So when you see those humble forms scurry within the bushes, stop and think of how they got here and know that they have a journey in them. When the days grow long again a sunlight-triggered switch will flip and winter’s contentment will be replaced by an uncontainable unrest. The stripes upon their heads grow thick and black and their crowns regrow in brightness. The birds around them start to sing and they add their voices to the spring chorus. They grow hungrier, eat more, and become larger than they were. Then the April night arrives when the journey can no longer be postponed.
You thought they were just little birds, timid, weak, and grounded. But each will take off into the darkness on a thousand mile journey away from home and away from warmth. They have nothing to sustain them but a few grams of fat beneath their few thin feathers. They will sleep in strange and unfamiliar places, cross waters of which they do not know the shore, and face enemies they cannot fight.
The crowned sparrows see the stars and a polar glow upon the sky. They are freshly helmeted in their gold or white and black, fitted in an armor that gives no physical protection, but which provides a more valuable courage. They lift their high shrill songs with an increasing sense of urgency. And from spring’s land of seeming plenty they launch into a black sea of stars in search of wilder places.
Winter crowns still mark the kings
As I said above, the basics of crowned sparrow identification are simple: if a sparrow has a golden crown, it’s a golden-crowned sparrow and if a sparrow has head stripes of crisp black and white, it’s a white-crowned sparrow. But there are variations in these crowns, some of which are subtle or inconsistent, but which are essential to understanding how these birds interact.
White-crowned sparrows:
- The obvious part: young, first-winter birds have brown and tan stripes rather than the black-and-white stripes of adults.
- The subtle part: males have more strongly contrasting head stripes than females, on average.
Golden-crowned sparrows:
- The obvious part: birds in breeding plumage have bright yellow crowns and thick black eyebrows (“lateral crown stripes”). You can see birds in transitional states to or away from this at the beginning of fall and especially before their spring departure. But for most of the winter the golden crowns are dull and the eyebrows are thinner.
- The subtle part: fresh young birds have no eyebrows. Then they get thin brown eyebrows. Adults get thick black eyebrows in the breeding season, that then get thinner or patchier, but stay more or less black in winter. Or so you’d think. But careful studies have found a layer of confusing inconsistency: males all seem to follow this progression to black eyebrows, but many females (perhaps two-thirds, though this number is not quite pinned down) revert to immature-style brown eyebrows in winter even after full maturity.1
The first big takeaway is this: high contrast crowns correlate with maturity and are on average more distinct in males. This fits our common understanding of bright colors in most birds: the higher visibility to predators is presumably compensated for by increased appeal to females, who view the bright crowns as evidence of fitness.
The second takeaway is that these patterns can be very subtle, often to the point of practical invisibility to us. You usually can’t tell at a glance if a white-crowned sparrow is male or female. You often can’t reliably tell the sex or age of a golden-crowned sparrow. The potential clues based on the amount of black in their eyebrows runs along an inconsistent spectrum of “no black” to “a few speckles” to “mostly black” to “all black.” But many of these signs will be much clearer to a sparrow, just as there are subtleties by which humans judge each other. When you meet a stranger, you react both consciously and unconsciously to their size, sex, age, clothes, and more. The same is true of birds.
The third takeaway is that most of these signs persist throughout the winter, when they are not being used for mate selection. This is because the same signs are used for social standing in a flock: male sparrows are slightly larger than females and adults are on average “fitter” than the first-winter birds, many of whom will not survive the season. If your crown indicates that you are a mature male, other birds will get out of your way rather than engage in a fight that they will probably lose.
The more you look at a flock of sparrows, in other words, the more you will recognize that they are not undifferentiable birds at all—that they are in fact among the most differentiable. What your eyes passed over in the past is actually a rich and varied tapestry. Sometimes these differences are sharp and clear—another species may be in the flock, perhaps a white-throated or a fox sparrow. Closer observation might reveal a difference of origin, the varied routes that lead this white-crowned sparrow to California: here’s an orange-billed traveler from Canada among the yellow-billed residents of our coastline. But even among birds of the same species and geographic race, you can always find distinguishing details: what before was just a brown bird becomes a white-crown, becomes an adult, becomes a probable male, becomes a king among the flock to whom others yield their places.
I’ve previously celebrated the plain non-flockers, birds like titmice and towhees, who live year-round in little Nations of Two. In some ways such birds are perceived by us as more unique individuals: you can generally assume that the birds you see now are the same birds you saw last month. But in other ways they are harder to tell apart: will you notice when a different towhee creeps across the borders, or when one of your titmouse pair is replaced? In practice, they all look the same, because as a species they have opted for continuous monogamy and territoriality rather than flocking and so have reduced need for both mate-selection signals and flock-status signals. But you can look at any flock of crowned sparrows and tell several individuals apart, or at least sort them into a few distinct categories.
Flocking is an evolutionary choice, with major benefits that make it overall more popular than year-round territoriality, notably increased safety and ability to find food. When many eyes are watching out for predators, warnings of dangers are given sooner, while each individual bird can spend a smaller amount of proportional time looking over her shoulder. And should a predator attack, a bird is generally better off in a flock, where the multiplicity of moving targets actually makes it harder for a predator to catch anything. Finding food is also more successful, particularly in the case of young birds who can follow the lead of experienced survivors.
Living in a flock could potentially have its own conflicts as birds compete over particular resources. These are largely mediated by accepted status signals, like the crowns of these sparrows. When new birds join the flock, there may be some initial handbags as the pecking order is established, but the general level of intra-flock conflict is kept at a very mild simmer throughout the winter. There are occasional little squabbles that might go so far as a sudden aggressive advance or (usually non-contact) jab of the bill. But the most common pattern is that a dominant bird chooses to go somewhere and subordinate birds yield the ground. There is no hereditary nobility or divine mandate to these relationships, but the crowns the sparrows wear do serve to indicate the current kings with sufficient practical precision: a bold and gleaming crown is probably a bigger, stronger, mature male, with whom it would be unwise for a five-month old female to start a rumble.
So the sparrows still wear their crowns in winter, to keep peace and order in the flock. Not for them the constant fights of territory of the unrankable gray or brown birds. And the closer you look, the more of this you will see, though much will remain opaque to our insensitive and unpracticed vision.
You thought that the sparrows were all alike and interchangeable. But now that autumn shower launches a dozen different voices and those scratchers by the roadside each take on a different light. We live within our human tribes, in which each member is unique. The sparrows also live in tribes like these, assembled from bold travelers who each survived a long passage through darkness and dangers. Now they find their allies, look out for one another, and share everything they know.
Disputing borders is for provincials, but these are birds who’ve seen the world, now a thousand miles from their nest sites. They have left those battles far behind them. And so you’ll see these birds you thought so common do something rare among our singers: stand beside each other, singing, without the urge to fight.
We’ll meet again when the songs of spring subside
The days again grow longer and a wider chorus begins to sound. Hummingbirds dive in bold displays, while juncos and towhees start trilling in the treetops. The virtuosic mockingbirds and greenbacks compose anew their ever changing melodies. And the crowned sparrows prepare to depart.
Their songs, heard intermittently throughout the winter, grow more frequent, though it may not seem like it now that the full orchestra is tuning up. April marches steadily towards May, and the sparrows begin to assume their breeding plumage: you see flecks of white come into the tan upon the young white-crowns’ heads, the black grow thicker on the golden-crowns, and that tarnished copper turn to brilliant yellow. Their other home is calling, to which they will return with that same fidelity with which they came to California.
They go to refresh the wells of song, from which we heard only the subsided levels of winter. The young will put on the crowns of maturity and make their northward journey for the first time. And should they return again, now three-time survivors of that transit, they will be done with deference. Next fall when they return and you hear their tundra songs, you will know that they have travelled through a hundred dangers, sung to ward off rivals, raised families, and return now with the badges of experience. They will have earned their crowns and will take new places in the flock.
Every season has its music, and so I listen once again as winter’s song fades into that of spring. I simply listen without dissection as those pure whistles ring out in the aftermath of rain and the dripping water rolls its slow tattoo. A momentary sound—once more those three descending notes. A glimpse among the branches—a crown now shining in the daily growing light.
Tonight the sun sets later than it did the night before. The stars glimmer in an unclouded sky. This evening the sparrows take off into the darkness and in the morning they are gone.
Their song is one of quiet places and California now grows noisy with its lovely springtime clamor. In autumn the kings will come again, when the quiet light sinks lower. In autumn they will sing again, when my ears are ripe to hear them.
Header photo: Golden-crowned sparrow in breeding plumage by Doug Greenberg
It is such a privilege to have such precise knowledge so beautifully communicated. Thank you, Jack!
So, so beautifully told…fascinating & enchanting to read about their navigation by starlight or when overcast, their inner compass/magnetic sensor…extraordinary travelers who bring the sound of fall to our doors. Thanks so much, Jack!
These are my favorite feeder birds, as they come just as the summer has ended and whistle mournfully all through the drearier parts of the year, usually leaving my property in late March (but they stayed longer, into April, in 2020. I am glad to read more about them.
Thank you DuBose, Chris, and Sharon!
We have been feeding the finches, juncos and others for decades. We were able to get rid of rats more than once by using the sprays that deter them, but suddenly this year we seem to have an intractable problem. A sharp shinned hawk has begun to visit and grab a little bird every day. The idea of stopping feeding the little guys is a heart breaking choice, but what else can we do? Since he’s been showing up in the last few weeks, we’ve also been visited by a coopers and a red shoulder. Yikes!!!! Any suggestions would be appreciated.
In many cases, there’s not too much to do: a sharp-shinned hawk will generally eat ~1 bird per day or starve, while the hawk won’t eat more than it needs, so attracting birds to your yard is not necessarily increasing the fatality rate for any given individual hawk. In certain cases, it might make it easier on the margin for a hawk of mediocre hunting skill to survive, but the framing of “if the hawk doesn’t catch some little birds, it will die” I find still reduces the clear-cut absence of sympathy to hawks that many people seem to instinctively react with. That’s what hawks do, whether it’s in your yard or down the street.
Practically speaking, if it seems like the hawk strikes are coming from a certain direction or preferred perch site, you might be able to move your feeding to an area with clearer sightlines to reduce the ease of ambush. Alternatively, I’ve known some people to move their feeders under direct cover of overhanging branches to reduce clear flight paths for the hawks. It can be very location-specific! The other thing that could potentially compound the problem this winter in particular is if you have any pine siskins sick with salmonella, which makes them easy picking and would be a reason to temporarily discontinue seed feeding in any case. For more on the higher incidence of salmonella among pine siskins in this winter of 2020-21, see our
store site
.