The Great Trickster

Those of us who grew up in the east and midwest can be easily confused by this common southwestern bird.

And with good reason: the Song Sparrows of the desert southwest are unusually pale, reddish, and sparsely marked, and they tend to hold their tails cocked high, wren-like, as they poke and prod the wet edges of rivers and ponds. I regularly spend a fair bit of time convincing people that these are in fact Song Sparrows, even though “they don’t look at all like the ones back home!”

When Spencer Baird described these ‘desert’ Song Sparrows in 1854, he recognized their distinctiveness, and in a bit of ornithological wit, named them fallax, the deceiver. And they continue to deceive birders who let themselves be misled by the details of their plumage rather than concentrating on their typically Song-Sparrow-like shape and structure and voice.