Swamp Sparrow Melospiza georgiana
New York and California

The Swamp Sparrow breeds from eastern Yukon and British Columbia eastward to Labrador, southward to eastern Nebraska to coastal Maryland and winters from southern New England to Florida, and from the southern Great Lakes region through Texas into much of the Mexican interior.

As its name makes clear it’s a wetland species, usually found in freshwater and tidal marshes, bogs, meadows, and swamps, though in winter and on migration it sometimes appears in a variety of other habitats. Swamp Sparrows typically feed quietly but actively at the water’s edge, keeping low to the ground and picking invertebrates from mud or from the water surface. An unobtrusive species rather than a wary one, Swamp Sparrows will often seem to disappear from view when a birder gets too close, but will almost always re-appear after a few minutes carefully picking their way around and under fallen branches or along the edge of shallow waterways.

Often thought as of being very similar to Song and Lincoln’s Sparrows, the Swamp Sparrow is slimmer, finer-billed and shorter-tailed and longer-legged than any Song Sparrow and the strongly rufous colouration to the crown (particularly of breeding males) and wings and the broad grey half-collar separate it from Lincoln’s which it more closely resembles in suructure and habits (for Old World birders, Lincoln’s will seem a more “familiar” bunting- or Dunnock-like bird than Swamp Sparrow which even on brief views is clearly an “American Sparrow”).

New York, April

New York, April

New York, April

New York, April

Chicago, April

San Francisco, January

Lincoln’s Sparrow, San Francisco, January

Song Sparrow, New York, April

New York, April

All photographs © Charlie Moores