Easterners

A large part of the allure of many North American emberizids is their restricted range: who hasn’t spent time on the southern Great Plains for Harris’s Sparrow, in the piney woods of the southeast for Bachman’s Sparrow, in trashy southwestern washes looking for Abert’s Towhee?

But for each of these local specialties, there are sparrows whose fascination is based in just the opposite, in their vast distribution over most of the continent. Song Sparrow and Dark-eyed Junco, for example, are among the commonest and most widespread birds in the Nearctic, ranging from Alaska to Florida, from California to Quebec.

But they aren’t the same everywhere.

This Song Sparrow is on territory here in Madison County, New York, singing the day away on the edge of Woodman Pond. He’s unmistakably an eastern bird, with those heavy chocolate markings–as unlike our pale reddish birds in southeast Arizona as you can imagine.

The juncos here, too, are distinctly eastern in appearance: dark and fairly uniform in coloration, the males deep slate, the females (like this one) with just a tinge of brown on the back.

This individual is a regular and greedy visitor to Alison’s millet pile; interestingly, the bird shows a single white wingbar on the left, formed by the tips of the greater coverts, while on the right wing, shown here, those spots either have worn away or were never present.