Birdsong

Singing Indigo Bunting

As any serious bird-watcher knows, the term that denotes our hobby is terribly misleading.  A newcomer or an outsider usually assumes that because the pursuit is called “bird-watching”, then they should always be able to see birds, and see them well.  Binoculars, naturally, are often thought of as instruments serving to endow bird-watchers with a nearly super-human ability to see the birds that fly their merry ways, unseen to the casual observer.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is, “bird-watching” could just as easily be called “bird-listening.”  According to bird-watching experts, most birders (a term I prefer to bird-watchers—but due more to its brevity than its accuracy) identify at least 80 percent of the birds they find by sound, not sight.  Admittedly, we birders could probably actually see a fair chunk of this 80 percent if we made the effort to look, but in a lot of cases, these birds call and sing from the middle of dense woods, marshes, briar thickets—places we’d rather not go.  Of course, if the bird making sounds in this uninviting terrain is one that is new or especially exciting to us, we’re more than happy to make the effort to actually see it, even if it means braving poison ivy, saw-edged marsh grasses, skin-ripping greenbriar, ticks, mosquitoes, and venomous snakes; or maneuvering more mundane obstacles such as fallen trees, creeks, holes, gnats, etc.  And, succeeding in the face of all these impediments—finally seeing the rare bird—wins the hardworking birder a valuable excuse to brag at the next bird club meeting.

But I digress.  Another great truth of birding: binoculars are excellent tools, and without them birding as we know it would be next to impossible.  However, they will not give you any extraordinary abilities in locating birds; the most they can do is magnify what you’re seeing, so that the amazing beauty and variety of birds are more apparent.  As to locating birds, the only way to improve this skill is with practice.  Even with years of field experience, though, there are some birds that will manage to elude you, or at least elude your eyes.

I’m certainly not immune to the caprices of bird behavior.  The times that I’ve been outmaneuvered by birds are too numerous to name.  Sometimes it is an individual bird on one particular day; other times an entire species seemingly conspires against my earnest efforts to see it.  For example, I have yet to observe The Chuck-will’s-widow and Whip-poor-will—both secretive night birds with calls proclaiming their names—up close and through binoculars.  I have seen a live Chuck-wills-widow in the wild—it flew up from the road in front of the family car one night.  I saw just enough of its brown wings and white-bordered tail to positively identify it.  These birds’ secrecy is part of their mystique, though, so I’m perfectly happy to just listen to their rhythmic, intriguing nighttime songs, and if I happen to see one in full view someday, so much the better.

Other nocturnal birds like owls also prove elusive.  However, since owls are generally large and hunt from relatively prominent places—not impenetrable thickets like the haunts of the Chuck-wills-widow and Whip-poor-will—they are usually a little easier to observe.  Where I live in Macon, there are Great Horned Owls that live and hunt around the pastures and backyard pecan orchards.  I have seen them on a number of occasions, but more often I hear their resonant hoots, especially on moonlit nights in late winter when the trees are bare.  It’s a very comforting sound, and it foretells the owls’ courtship and eventual nesting, since these charismatic hunters breed and raise young very early in the year.

Sometimes vocal but difficult-to-see birds can be very frustrating.  The arrival of spring brings lots of migrating songbirds, many of which choose to proclaim their territories through song from the tops of the very tallest trees.  Then, it is literally a pain in the neck to try to see these birds, craning your head back as you look through your binoculars, trying to focus on the five-inch long warbler flitting forty feet above you as it sings its squeaky melody.  Of course, it could be worse; a lot of warbler songs are too high-pitched for some people to hear—the songs of Blackpoll, Bay-breasted, Black-throated Green, and Blackburnian Warblers, for example.  Even John James Audubon, one of the founders of American ornithology, is said to have had difficulty hearing the songs of a number of birds, especially wood-warblers.  On the other hand, several warbler species have very loud songs and are relatively easy to see; go into a swampy woodland, and you may see and hear a vivid yellow Prothonotary Warbler making its shrill tweet tweet tweet tweet song in the deep, gloomy shade of the cypress trees.  I promise you, it’s an amazing experience.

One of my favorite warblers, interestingly, is one that I haven’t actually seen more than a few times.  Not that that’s anything unusual: Swainson’s Warblers are notoriously tricky to see.  One of these sightings was of a bird flying away after I attempted to creep on it while it sang in a thicket.  More recently, this year I heard a Swainson’s Warbler in an overgrown wood during a spring migration survey.  After tallying it, I decided to walk through the dense undergrowth in hopes of spotting it.  Sure enough, as soon as I deduced what direction it was in, the bird moved to another spot and began its loud, ringing song again.  Despite the frustration it sometimes provokes in me, this incredibly secretive behavior coupled with the interesting song is one of the reasons I find the Swainson’s Warbler so fascinating, and I always enjoy encounters with them, visual or otherwise.

Probably you can think of at least a few birds whose sounds are particularly meaningful to you in some way.  Maybe they evoke fond memories; or are associated with certain seasons or times of day; or perhaps are simply beautiful, amusing, awe-inspiring…the list goes on.  The robin’s hurried morning warblings, the mockingbird’s nighttime virtuoso recital, the softly lilting tur-a-lee of the bluebird, the energetic drummings of woodpeckers, the shrill scream of a Red-tailed Hawk, the echoing honks of migrating geese—these and countless other calls not only hold special significance to birders, but are familiar sounds in our day-to-day relationship with the natural world.  Even something as seemingly mundane as a crow’s guttural caw caw can bring a lot of interesting feelings to an observer.

Seeing birds is always a pleasure, but sometimes it helps to just stop and listen to them as they go about their lives.  This can be difficult; it’s hard to resist the impulse to search for a bird that you can hear but not see (after all, this is bird-watching), but even hearing birds fills you in on interesting aspects of their ecology, enables you to identify them, and just makes birding more fun and meaningful.  Another thing to keep in mind: although you can see the birds that are right in front of your eyes during birding jaunts, their songs are all around you.

Irruptions

Although northeast-central Mississippi didn’t get much icy precipitation out of the much-hyped winter storm system, temperatures dropped considerably—enough, apparently, to urge the neighborhood wild birds into a kind of foraging frenzy the following day.  In our backyard, White-throated and Song Sparrows, Rusty Blackbirds, Purple Finches, Hermit Thrushes, and other species busily searched for food underneath the oak leaves that line the ground.  I thought back to winters in northwestern Arkansas, where, in contrast to Mississippi, snows are a regular occurrence.  I saw my first American Tree Sparrows during one of those winters—my first winter in Arkansas, when there was a record-setting blizzard (https://www.weather.gov/tsa/weather_event_2011feb1) that dumped several inches of snow in late January and early February.  The tree sparrows were feeding with Dark-eyed Juncos on the snow-covered ground.  It was really neat to see.

One of my photos of American Tree Sparrows (with Dark-eyed Juncos).

I remembered that I hadn’t submitted this record to eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s online bird database (to which I am slowly, steadily adding my older birding notes), so I pulled up my computer to do that.  The eBird checklist that loaded for that region and season had American Tree Sparrow flagged as “rare,” which surprised me for a second, because I knew plenty of other people in Arkansas who had seen the species.  But then I remembered: American Tree Sparrows are often an irruptive species (http://www.tnwatchablewildlife.org/details.cfm?displayhabitat=grassland&sort=aounumber&typename=GRASSLAND%20AND%20SHRUB&uid=09081113200239105&commonname=American%20Tree%20Sparrow), meaning that they move farther south, in larger numbers, when food sources up north are too low.  Like many ecological concepts, bird species irruption is all too easy to oversimplify, but the gist of it is that some species of trees have boom-and-bust seed-producing cycles, with some years—i.e., the mast years—yielding particularly large crops.  Birds that feast and raise lots of young on a bountiful crop one year may find themselves in danger of starvation the next year.  What is there to do in such a situation?  Look for food elsewhere, generally.  American Tree Sparrows aren’t the only ones to do this, of course.  Red-breasted Nuthatches, Pine Siskins, Red Crossbills, and Evening Grosbeaks are some of the best-known examples of irruptive species.  But tree sparrows are on the list, and the winter of 2010-2011 was apparently one of the ones in which they invaded the south in larger numbers than usual.  I hadn’t really realized it before, but I was lucky to be in Arkansas during a major irruption year when I could observe this species in my “yard” without much effort!

Satisfied with this information, I uploaded a couple of my tree sparrow photos to my checklist, submitted it, and, to confirm my theory, went to look at the eBird species graphs for American Tree Sparrow in Arkansas.  Examining the line graphs of abundance from various years, starting with 2010-2011, yielded some interesting results.  The eBird site currently allows you to compare up to five separate years in the abundance graph for a single species.  As you can see here, in Arkansas in 2011, American Tree Sparrow numbers shot up dramatically.

Not my graph!  Credit to Cornell Lab's eBird.

https://ebird.org/

Because species may have very different distributions and dietary preferences/requirements, they are not all on the same cycle when it comes to irruption.  Red-breasted Nuthatches in Mississippi, for instance, showed a population peak in the 2012-2013 winter, a smaller one in 2016-2017, and another one again this winter, 2018-2019.  (The graph shows Mississippi populations only, and I didn’t include 2019, since we’re only a month into the year.)  

2010-2014, eBird

https://ebird.org/

2014-2018, eBird

 https://ebird.org/

The Red-breasted Nuthatch that arrived in the backyard last October.

If you look at the distribution maps on eBird, some of the same general patterns can be detected.  It’s a bit subtler on the distribution maps than on the line graphs, but the dark purple spots of the maps—the areas with a greater frequency of sightings—are definitely more noticeable in the southeastern United States in the years 2012 and 2013, which were the years of one of the best recent irruptive seasons for Red-breasted Nuthatches.

Red-breasted Nuthatch distribution graphs modified from eBird (https://ebird.org/).

Predicting when the next irruption will occur is relatively straightforward, I suppose, but only time will tell just how extensive it will be.  In the meantime, overwintering wild birds, irruptive and non-irruptive alike, aren’t wasting a second in their daily pursuit of finding enough food to survive the cold and bleak conditions.  Spring is on its way, though, so they will be traveling back to their northern nesting territories fairly soon, where, hopefully, they will find a plethora of food sources awaiting them.

Sparrows!

It’s that time of year again: sparrow season!  The subtleties of plumage and behavior in the various sparrow species make them a lot of fun to study, as most birders will affirm.  Because North America is rich in sparrows, I’m going to limit my focus mainly to the common sparrows of the Southeast.  Since I’ve also spent a lot of time in northwestern Arkansas, I’ll throw in a few species from that region, as well.  Who knows?  Some of them might show up in your backyard.

Probably the most abundant sparrow in woods and thickets in southeastern North America right now is the White-throated Sparrow.  Even when you can’t see these birds, you can usually find them by listening for their sputtering pink! calls.  They also sing quite frequently on the wintering grounds, and the song is a plaintive, whistled melody that is very easy to learn (a couple of helpful mnemonics are “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody” and “Oh, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada”).  Some White-throated Sparrows have white “eyebrow” and crown stripes as well as white throats, while others are drabber, with buff-colored stripes.  

White-throated Sparrow

The White-throated Sparrow has a slightly larger cousin, the White-crowned Sparrow, which also has bold stripes on the head.  While White-crowned Sparrows are apparently very common in the winter months in many regions of the continent, they seem to be scarce where I live; I have seen them at only a handful of locations in Mississippi.  When I lived in Arkansas, however, I observed them regularly, usually from October to early May.  They even showed up at my feeders.  In my experience, you might have good luck searching for White-crowneds in habitats that are slightly more open and brushy than the usual places where you find White-throated Sparrows.  

White-crowned Sparrow

If the habitat is really open, as in fields and pastureland, you will likely find Savannah Sparrows.  These are small, short-tailed, brown-streaked sparrows with yellow lores (that is, the areas just in front of the eyes).  These birds have high-pitched, insect-like calls and usually forage in loose flocks.

Savannah Sparrow (perched in willows, yes, but in a marshy field)

The Chipping Sparrow and the Field Sparrow are other common sparrows of more open types of habitats.  The Chipping Sparrow is numerous throughout the year in the Southeast, while the Field Sparrow is a bit harder to find.  However, like the Chipping Sparrow, it commonly breeds in southeastern North America.  The bouncing, trilling song of the Field Sparrow is one of my favorite sounds to hear in old fields and brushy cedar groves in the summer.  The Chipping Sparrow’s dry, almost mechanical-sounding song, on the other hand, may not be as aurally pleasing, but hearing it always reminds me of the open pine woodlands where the species usually nests.

Chipping Sparrow being banded

Field Sparrow

As far as plumage goes, both Chipping and Field Sparrows have plain underparts, prominent wing bars, and long tails.  Field Sparrows’ outer tail feathers are white—a useful field mark to remember when the birds are flitting away from you.  The Field Sparrow’s white eye ring and pink bill are distinctive year-round, while the Chipping Sparrow becomes somewhat drabber after molting into winter plumage—although it does retain its eye-line and crown. 

Song Sparrows commonly occur throughout most of the United States during the colder months.  In many regions, they are year-round residents.  In Mississippi, however, they are gone by mid-spring, even though the males will occasionally sing their territorial songs in the winter.  I finally heard actual breeding Song Sparrows—not just the out-of-season songs—in northern Alabama and Georgia this year, which was a treat.  Away from Song Sparrow breeding territories, you’re far more likely to hear the nasal, raspy call that the birds use for contacts and alarms.  The Song Sparrow is pretty distinctive in appearance, being fairly large and long-tailed.  It has brown streaks on its breast and sides, and a very prominent central breast spot.

Song Sparrow

All that said, the Song Sparrow may be confused with the Lincoln’s Sparrow in places where both species are common.  In my part of the southeastern U.S., Lincoln’s Sparrows are quite rare during the winter.  However, when I lived in northwestern Arkansas, I saw many of them.  They’re smaller than Song Sparrows, with shorter tails and more grayish coloration on their heads.  If Song Sparrows look as though their jagged breast markings were drawn with crayons, then Lincoln’s Sparrows look like they’ve been finely penciled. 

Lincoln's Sparrow

Lincoln’s Sparrows are closely related to the more abundant Swamp Sparrows, which—true to their name—love skulking in marshes, wetlands, and moist thickets.  Unlike Song and Lincoln’s Sparrows, Swamp Sparrows lack bold underpart markings; the patterns on their breasts and bellies are more like smudgy watercolor.  Their reddish wings and gray-and-brown heads make them easy to recognize, and their chip calls are louder and more emphatic than those of most other sparrows.  

Swamp Sparrow -- note gray head and reddish wings

Swamp Sparrow underpart view

The Fox Sparrow is another of the relatively common wintering sparrows.  As its name suggests, it—or, at least, its eastern form—is patterned with bright rufous streaks and stripes.  In western North America, there are other color forms in addition to the “red” one.  To be honest, I don’t see these large and flashy sparrows particularly often where I live.  My tip for finding them is to check in thickets of berry-producing shrubs and vines in wooded areas.  When I find Fox Sparrows, they are usually single or in very small groups.  Keep alert for their loud smack! calls.  

Fox Sparrow -- note yellow bill, gray on head, and extensive rufous coloration.

Now let’s look at a sparrow that isn’t brown, but slate-gray and white.  The Dark-eyed Junco is a common wintering species in thickets and open woods all over the U.S.  If you have bird feeders, you may see it feeding in small flocks on the ground.  When startled, the birds give trilling flight calls and flash their white outer tail feathers.

Dark-eyed Junco

For good measure, here are some other sparrow species that I saw when I lived in Arkansas.  Unlike the previous birds, all of these are very rare in Mississippi.  My time spent observing them out-of-state will hopefully come in handy, though, if they ever show up around my current birding spots!

One of my favorites, mainly for its flashiness, is the Harris’s Sparrow.  This is an enormous sparrow, even bigger than Fox Sparrows, and its bold black crown and “beard,” along with the salmon-pink bill, draw the eye.  I spotted this particular Harris’s from my apartment window while I was working at my desk one day in late April.  You can tell that it is in breeding plumage rather than winter plumage, since its head is pale gray instead of buff-colored.  This was an interesting day for migratory birds, actually; a Rose-breasted Grosbeak landed in the thicket shortly after I snapped pictures of the sparrow.  Harris’s Sparrows are mainly western birds and occur very rarely in Mississippi.

Harris's Sparrow

The bird in the photo below appeared, along with a companion that I didn’t manage to photograph, in the woods near my apartment on a warm day in May.  Although the identification of these birds was quite evident to me—despite the fact that I hadn’t seen this species before—  I thought that, in looks and behavior, these Clay-colored Sparrows were uncannily similar to Chipping Sparrows—but also just different enough that they stood out from the other birdlife in the area.  While Clay-colored Sparrows pass through Arkansas (and much of central North America) during migration, relatively few of them travel through Mississippi. 

Clay-colored Sparrow

An even more unusual species for Mississippi is the American Tree Sparrow.  American Tree Sparrows showed up in my “yard” in moderate numbers during a snowy winter in Arkansas.  Like Chipping Sparrows, they have very plain and pale breasts—at least, for the most part: one of the key field marks of the American Tree Sparrow is a single dark spot in the center of the breast.  This species is commonly found farther north than the area where I currently live, but there have been sightings in more southerly regions.  At any rate, I’m glad that I have had the chance to see it.

American Tree Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos

Although sparrows can sometimes be confusing to sort out in the field, the key is to pay close attention to their plumage, behavior, and habitat.  Familiarizing yourself with the common species in your area will also help you to detect rare and unusual species more quickly.  Happy sparrow-watching!