FOAM LAKE BIRDING
No. 157
The summer
weather is still holding providing farmers with some great harvesting
conditions. Let's hope it holds. It also provides for some good warm weather
birding.
In last
week's article one of the pictures showed a Clay Coloured Sparrow sitting
beside a Brown Headed Cowbird. This
commonly overlooked sparrow is actually quite common and any effort to find and
observe one will usually be successful.
They are more rural than the Chipping Sparrows but are often seen in towns
in spring and on occasion will even nest there if there is a fairly decent size
clump of trees and shrubs.
The Clay
Coloured Sparrow is quite nondescript and requires a bit of practice to
identify it readily. In the summer time
it looks a lot like a Chipping Sparrow except it does not have the red cap nor
black eye line. Instead, it has a brown
cap with a whitish line running through it and a black "mustache"
rather than an eye line. Upon closer examination
with binoculars the clay coloured nape clearly stands out and is a definitive
field mark. To my way of thinking it
might have been better to have named it the Clay Collared Sparrow. In the fall the Clay Coloured Sparrow looks
very much like a juvenile Chipping Sparrow so care must be taken when
identifying the birds. In the summer
time the best field mark is the song.
Its song is a rather long (tow or three seconds) buzz in one pitch that
sounds much like a very loud grasshopper.
No other bird has a song like it.
Males and females are the same.
This week's
photo was taken in our back yard a few years ago. In a colour photo the clay coloured nape is
clearly visible.
Posts
