Look down. Today’s bird excitement is at your feet. It’s sparrow season.
In spring, birders complain about “warbler neck,” the pain that comes from looking up at songbirds. Most warblers are gone now, bound for their winter home in the tropics. Instead, we’ve got sparrows hopping conveniently everywhere. Small and plump, with seed-crunching bills, many sparrows pass through the state on their way south this time of year. While foraging, they are often lured under your bird feeder to clean up what the chickadees have dropped.
American sparrows are not closely related to European sparrows. Our sparrows are members of the Emberizidae family, a New World group that also includes towhees and juncos. The only Old World sparrow we have in Maine is the house sparrow, which was introduced from Europe and is now the familiar sparrow of McDonald’s parking lots and shopping malls.
Sparrows are generally brown and streaky. The song sparrow is the most common in our area, and many are still hanging around. They go south for the winter, but not far, and some can even be found in southern Maine through the colder months. Chipping sparrows are also common locally. You’ve seen them around parks and parking lots. Most of them have departed, and the remainder will be gone within a week.
As soon as chipping sparrows move out, American tree sparrows move in. These arctic breeders migrate south for the winter. For them, Maine is south. They are a little trickier to find because they like to stay hidden in the cover of shrubs and bushes. However, they will forage under bird feeders and often will pop up onto platform feeders. Expect a November arrival.
White-throated sparrows are an abundant breeder in the Maine forest. They are swarming around backyards right now, often in small flocks. They call frequently, a very quiet “seet” sound, which keeps them in touch with the flock. Once you learn the sound, you’ll be amused at how plentiful they are. When snow covers the ground, they’ll head south, too.
Sometimes, you may detect an oddball among the white-throated sparrows. White-crowned sparrows breed farther north, with a range that begins in northern Newfoundland and above the St. Lawrence River. Good numbers trickle through Maine in October on the way to their wintering grounds in the Middle Atlantic States. The white and black stripes on their heads are much brighter than the stripes of a white-throated sparrow.
Beware the juvenile white-crowned sparrows. They fool many a birder. In their first autumns, juveniles have rusty brown caps and plain white breasts. They more closely resemble chipping sparrows or tree sparrows than they do their own parents.
Fox sparrows nest in the north Maine woods, generally in areas with lots of spruce and fir. The bulk of eastern breeders are up in Canada. They all wend their way southward at a leisurely pace, and can scratch the ground under bird feeders through November. They are larger than the average sparrow, and our subspecies in the east tends to be the color of bricks. Western fox sparrows range in color from light brown to dark gray.
The dark-eyed junco is a member of the sparrow family. Juncos are widespread and vary in color across the country. In Maine, we have just the one subspecies, known as the slate-colored junco. Adults are uniformly dark gray on top, white on the belly, with a pinkish bill and white outer tail feathers. They are prolific breeders in the Maine woods. In autumn, they wander out of the forest, gather in flocks, and forage in open areas. Some of the flocks can be surprisingly large. Several hundred passed by my house last week. A few juncos linger for the winter, but most go just far enough south that snow doesn’t cover their food supply.
Keep looking down. For a real treat, walk down a country road along the edge of a weedy field. Expect hundreds of sparrows to flush and flit. Summer belongs to the bug eaters, but seed eaters take over in autumn. Besides sparrows, other ground feeders begin to invade Maine this time of year. It starts with a trickle of horned larks and American pipits, then gives way to a torrent of snow buntings. If farmers have spread manure on a field near you, scan it with binoculars. Some of these species are notorious for picking undigested matter out of dung. Of course, if you are walking around manure … it’s prudent to keep looking down.
Bob Duchesne serves as a Maine Audubon trustee and vice president of its Penobscot Valley Chapter. Bob developed the Maine Birding Trail, with information at mainebirdingtrail.com. Bob can be reached at duchesne@midmaine.com.