sparrows | Shasta Birding Society

There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

By Dan Greaney on October 27, 2018 in BirdWords

Golden-crowned Sparrow

Alas, it seems the miners of 160 years ago missed out on most of it. The Golden State holds so much more amber wealth and beauty than just the lustrous mineral.

Golden hues deck our world liberally, often with ephemeral but recurring glory and ache. They join with pinks and grays to brush our skies at dawn and dusk. In spring they gleam from the soft petals of poppies and the burry stripes of the bees who visit them, and the sweet honey that those two together produce; in fall, the hills and fields of dried grass, especially under sun after rain, glow goldenrod, and maples and oaks effuse geysers of leaves radiant with mustard and ochre and burnished apricot; blonde cider flows from foothill orchards, and under foothill streams trout flash their brilliance. Gold shines in the eyes of blackbirds and eagles, and in bright braids from sun-dappled rivers and lakes; and this time of year, every year, from the optimistic caps of brown little birds, like something hopeful in the miner’s pan.

Adult Golden-crowned Sparrow

Golden-crowned sparrows are mostly a camouflage of browns and grays, perfect for hiding in under-brush shadows. But like so much of life, they have their shine, too—just a modest dash of color, for them. Adults wear their golden crowns offset with a circlet of black. Young birds sport a smaller, paler spot of yellow, bordered not by black but a nondescript earth tone, like last year’s leaves. Some observers note that the pinkish bill of young birds goes gray with age, starting with the upper mandible.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

These sparrows have been northward throughout the summer months. Denizens of the west, they nested from northern British Columbia up into Alaska, as far as the Arctic Circle, where, tucked among grasses and shrubs in boggy meadows, they wove a dense cup lined with feathers or moose hair, perhaps just above spring snow but most often on the ground. They raised a clutch or two with about four eggs in each.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

Now both parents and fledglings have flown south, centering their winter range right here in northern California. They can be seen at backyard feeders, although they are generally wilder and scarcer than their racier, more numerous cousins, the white-crowned sparrows.

White-crowned Sparrow

Like many sparrows, golden-crowns have a beautiful voice. In our brushy yards and hillsides they can be heard on sunny winter mornings, singing a clear Oh, dear, me! that manages to be both woebegone and beautiful.

Studies on these birds are few, but the sparrows are part of recent measurements of mass bird migrations. Weather radar, with increasing precision, has in the last several years harvested information on not just storm clouds but on clouds of birds. The researchers report spring migrations over the US/Canada border at about 2.6 billion birds. The return trip, coming south in autumn with a new season of surviving fledglings, numbers about 4 billion.

Those nesting seasons are immeasurably valuable. They keep the gold recurring in California.

White-crowned Sparrows Are Regular Visitors to Redding

By Dan Greaney on November 30, 2014 in In the News

White-crowned Sparrow

Birds are among the most evident wildlife around the world. They sing, sport a crazy variety of shapes and sizes and live in all sorts of habitats. They’re also often colorful and can be lured into close-up viewing. And they live here.

In Shasta County, we have more than 250 species seasonally every year, plus another 50 species who have made cameo appearances.

One regular visitor that graces our parks and backyards every winter is the diminutive white-crowned sparrow. This ball of feathers, the size of a child’s fist, is perhaps our most common bird of brush and patio. It has a subtle beauty that unmindful people will easily miss.

Its underside is a plain gray and, like most sparrows, its back is a mottled brown. But its bill is egg-yolk yellow and its head is decked out in bold black and white racing stripes.

That yellow beak is short and chunky — good for cracking seeds. These sparrows are eager visitors to bird feeders, where they specialize in eating up grains scattered on the ground. A close-up feeder or a pair of binoculars will allow precise inspection of the black-and-white head, which can reveal where the bird travels to nest in the summer. If the black-line behind the eye continues forward of the eye, that sparrow likely nests in Lassen or the Northern Rockies, from Colorado through Montana and Idaho.

These birds have mostly passed through our area and are now wintering at a resort in Baja. If the black line stops at the eye, these travelers may nest as far north as the high arctic of Canada and Alaska, a journey of as much as 200 miles — no mean feat for little birds that often look like they have to work hard just to cross the yard.

Whether in Redding, Baja or Fairbanks, sparrows are brush birds. White crowns nest within a few feet of the ground, building a soft cup of plant material. As is the case in many species, the female picks the nesting site. She typically lays three to five eggs, and both parents feed the young until they fledge in a week and a half, and then a little longer to get them going.

If you notice a sparrow whose black and white stripes are replaced with reddish-brown and tan, you are looking at a young bird, just hatched last spring. If it can survive through winter, it will fly to its nesting grounds, grow adult feathers, and try its own hand at raising a brood or two before returning to your yard next fall.

Wintu Audubon provides the new BirdWords column. Please send your local bird questions to education@wintuaudubon.org