driveway art: song sparrow

[asakiyume]

We have some sunny days, and I finished the job I was working on, so I drew a song sparrow. The song sparrow is found throughout most of North America, "continuous from the Aleutians to the eastern United States," says Cornell Ornithology. They're small everywhere bird with a lovely song. Both their song and their plumage varies across the continent.







Scientific name "Melospiza melodia." You can hear samples of their songs here. (The ones around here sound most like the fourth recording down.)

Comments

[light_of_summer]

Beautifully drawn, and lovely to hear—thank you!

I'm pretty sure I occasionally hear Song Sparrows in my neighborhood, but the local song has too many quick and varied notes for my brain to feel sure that I recognize its pattern.

We definitely have more White-Crowned Sparrows, here—their song also varies with location, but it's less melodically complex (at least to my ears).

I think we probably also have more California Towhees and Dark-eyed Juncos than Song Sparrows—those are both also new world sparrow species, but they don't say so in their common names. Their songs are a lot less complex than those of Song Sparrows.

On rare occasions, I've also seen Spotted Towhees out here—now there is a sparrow that looks prettier than it sounds!

I just did a count at allaboutbirds.org—they list 43 species in the family of new world sparrows, Passerellidae! (Yay, birds! \😄/ )

But the prettiest birdsong I've so far heard in this region was that of a Bewick's Wren that lived in my previous neighborhood—allaboutbirds.org says their individual males can have from 9 to 23 songs each. Ahhhhhhhh! 😌

[asakiyume]

Lovely song from the Bewick's wren! Someone on Mastodon posted a marsh wren singing--that was also a beautiful song.

We get dark-eyed juncos here, but only in the winter. The towhees we have are Eastern towhees--but I've only seen one once. It's similar to the spotted towhee though! The white-crowned sparrow is so pretty! The one I see here that's pretty like that is the white-throated sparrow--maybe in your area too?

[light_of_summer]

Wellllll, the map on allaboutbirds.org says that we do get nonbreeding White-Throated Sparrows, here, but I don't think I've ever spotted one that I recognized. I may have heard their song, though—the recording that I just played sounded a bit familiar.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯