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The Savannah Sparrow Passerculus sandwichensis, the only species of the genus Passerculus, is the Rodney Dangerfield of sparrows in that it gets no respect.  Though it has a nice yellow supercilium, this field mark, at least in the northeastern United States, is neither as impressive as the yellow at the front of the White-throated Sparrow’s [...]

I was in Vancouver last week and have already posted photos I took of a stunning male Varied Thrush, Chestnut-backed Chickadees, and an ‘intersex mallard’ (yes, it’s an interesting life indeed)…Anyway, another bird I always look for on any winter trips to Vancouver’s Stanley Park is the western form of Fox Sparrow Passerella iliaca unalaschensis, [...]

When I was in Toronto a few days ago (I’ll get a report online at some point I hope!) I came across a small sparrow foraging in some grass that I found difficult to identify at first. It became apparent what it was when it was joined by a (very worn) adult, but to begin [...]

April, while not as exciting a migratory month as May is in the northeastern United States, is still a great time of year to see migrating birds. Wood-warblers, those brightly-colored attention-whores of spring, have most birders swooning, but their numbers don’t really pick up until May. Sparrows, on the other hand, seem to [...]

After my trip to Van Cortlandt Park early Sunday morning I decided to hit up Central Park on my way home in the hopes of checking a couple more birds off of my Anti-Global Warming Big Year list. I was successful in doing so, spotting both a Fox Sparrow and a small flock of [...]

Ah, the deep thinking that goes into making a successful Big Year when the rostering decisions determining your destinations are made by someone else. Suppose for a moment that your scheduling department had sent you to Los Angeles for the first time in 2008. Would you go flat-out for the common species first (which almost [...]

North America’s archetypal “little brown job” the almost omnipresent Song Sparrow occupies much the same birding-niche in the Nearctic as the Dunnock does in the UK: if you’re birding here in the UK and a bird is seen only briefly or poorly as it disappears into vegetation and it ‘just has to be a rarity‘, [...]

Rather than reliving the rather boring experience of not finding an Orange-crowned Warbler at Alley Pond Park I figured I would (finally) wrap up blogging about my birding this past Saturday. Long story short: Alley Pond Park had some good birds like an Ovenbird and a juvenile Mourning Warbler but no Orange-crowned Warbler appeared [...]

Sunday morning saw me up and out of the house before 4 AM for a big trip with two of the other Big Year birders from the Albany area, Rich and Jory. Our destination? Jones Beach and Jamaica Bay, two exquisite birding destinations with which regular readers of this blog are probably altogether too familiar. [...]

Ah, California. Oranges, the Beach Boys, surfing dudes, wetlands, mountains, and deserts, great birds and great birding of course - and, what was that other thing I keep forgetting about? Oh, yes, FOG! Huge great sky-darkening, end-of-the-world-resembling, camera-messing banks of never-ending FOG. Take a look at the two photos below: both were taken from my [...]

A story in pictures…roll over the images for pop-up captions.

Once the female House Sparrow was driven off the males turned to fighting each other:

Too bad for the House Sparrows that a European Starling was waiting in the wings:

All of the pictures were taken in Kissena Park in Queens last weekend. And, no, I [...]

The weekend began for me with a Friday night for the ages, if I could only remember it. Daisy, her two sisters, her brother-in-law and I went to a karaoke bar and I made the mistake of trying to keep up in terms of drinking soju, a Korean liquor. I learned [...]

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 [...]

Chipping Sparrow, macro-style
On Friday, at my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Paul’s house in Saugerties, NY, I enjoyed myself watching their feeders and photographing the freeloaders. Their two clear-plastic feeders suction-cupped to their living room window had a steady stream of visitors but only titmice, chickadees and Chipping Sparrows would let me get close [...]

One endearing, some might say redeeming trait of sparrows is how the mix of species transforms dramatically based on geography and ecosystem. Sparrows,at least in North America, may always be there to bedevil you, but they won’t always be the devils you know. Travel widely enough and you may find a place where every sparrow [...]

White-browed Sparrow-weaver Plocepasser mahali
Uhuru Park, Nairobi, Kenya, November 2006

A large, chunky and aptly-named sparrow-like weaver, the White-browed Sparrow-weaver is an African endemic found in dry, acacia habitat from Somalia to South Africa. The birds usually occur in noisy groups, building very ragged, untidy roosting and breeding nests that typically look like they’ve been half-destroyed [...]

Spanish Sparrow Passer hispaniolensis
Sulaibikhat Nature Reserve, Kuwait. 06 February 2006
 
Spanish Sparrows are “very common winter visitors” to Kuwait, with a highest daily count of 1500 being made at Jahra Farms on 11th Jan 2002 (George Gregory, ‘The Birds of the State of Kuwait’, 2005).There a few small scattered breeding colonies in Kuwait, and a number [...]

When the Core Team went birding this past weekend, we weren’t just looking for warblers. Rumor had it that sparrows beyond the typical House and White-throated varieties could be found lurking about Central Park. Like 99.99% of the population, we have trouble distinguishing one little brown job from another, but that doesn’t stop us [...]

Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, 16 April 2005

Illinois, apparently, is recognized as the 6th most popular state and Chicago is the 9th most visited U.S. city by overseas visitors (which I guess includes me). Chicago - with a population of about 3 million - is located on the shores of Lake Michigan in the heart of [...]