How Many Wing Bars?

American Tree Sparrow

One of the few things I can still enjoy about winter in the snow zone is the chance to spend some time with one of my (fifty or sixty or so) favorite emberizids, the American Tree Sparrow.

There’s a game I like to play when I’m watching this or any other “familiar” bird: How, I ask myself, can this bird be identified without recourse to any of the old Petersonian “field marks”?

After all, once you’ve seen your first hundred or thousand or (probably, though I don’t have an exact count) ten thousand tree sparrows, you don’t really look at the rusty crown or the smudgy breast spot or the swollen, yellow-based mandible.

Those are all “micro” marks, often hard to pick out without the application of glass. And yet we know what we’re looking at even before we’ve switched off the car. So what are we actually seeing — and can we make our impressions explicit, in real live honest-to-goodness words?

American Tree Sparrow

Well, there’s the rather long, black tail with conspicuous white edging, for one thing. There’s the coarse back pattern of rufous and black tracks, so unlike the neater, finer markings of this species’ (current) congeners. And there’s that big reddish secondary panel that contrasts so strikingly with the most beautifully black and white tertials worn by any American sparrow.

But most of the time it’s that single bright white wing bar that catches my eye.

American Tree Sparrow

And every time it does, I smile. What I learned as a young birder was that

Two conspicuous white wing-bars are also characteristic,

in the words of what still ranks as one of the very best field guides ever.

Indeed, American Tree Sparrows do have very large, very conspicuous white tips to both the greater and the median secondary coverts.

Slater Museum -- click to visit this fantastic online resource.
Slater Museum — click to visit this fantastic online resource.

But just because a bird “has” two wing bars doesn’t mean it “has” two wing bars. More often, I think, than most sparrows, birds of this species tend — at least in the winter — to droop their scapulars and fluff their breast feathers, often covering the median coverts, and thus the “upper” wing bar, entirely, creating the effect of a single bold white slash across a rich chestnut field.

American Tree Sparrow

Even when the second, upper wing bar is visible, it tends to appear incomplete; in two hours of sparrowing the other day, I had sustained looks at a bird revealing both wing bars in their full glory exactly once.

None of this is exactly earthshaking, I suppose, and I’ll admit that I still take every opportunity I can to enjoy the classic, oft-repeated identification characters of this charming species. But my birding is invariably enriched when I stop to ask not “What is it?” but rather “How do we know?”

Maybe yours would be, too.

American Tree Sparrow

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The Last Resort

American Robin

How do you know it’s February?

Finally, after brightening the landscape for nearly six months now, those festive red sumac fruits are drawing birds. With softer, more palatable food sources pretty much gone, American Robins, Northern Flickers, and other frugivores are turning to these rock-hard, bristly little citrus-bitter seeds.

American Robin

Yes, it’s a sign of desperation. But it’s a sign of spring, too. Bring on the sumac banquets!

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Icepipers

With the shore ponds of Monmouth County mostly frozen, Alison and I spent a short hour at the tip of the Manasquan jetty yesterday mid-day, relishing the sunshine, grateful for the lack of wind, and dispassionately observing the gradual congelation of the blood in our toes.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

There weren’t huge numbers of birds, but as always, the birding was fun. Common and a few Red-throated Loons put the fear of God into the fish at the mouth of the inlet, and small flocks containing all three scoters — the vast majority, as expected, Black Scoters — were in constant view on the water or slithering through the air in loose lines offshore.

The paved portions of the jetty were nearly ice-free (else we would not have been out there), but the giant tinker toy structures were still coated in a thick frosting.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

That glaze was the source of some consternation for the Purple Sandpipers. 

Purple Sandpiper

Just a few moments after we arrived, a nice flock of about 80 Purples, probably flushed by the adult Peregrine Falcon that kept buzzing us and them, flew in to land at the base of the structure.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

In best purple piper fashion, every time a wave hit the jetty the flock would fly up, chittering, to land above the spray on top of the hexagonal pillars. And then, slowly at first, ever faster, and finally entirely out of control, they slid on splayed orange legs to the edge and fell fluttering off, landing, if they were lucky, on a more or less dry and more or less horizontal surface.

Purple Sandpiper

After a pause to catch their breath, they were back down, busy, along the water’s edge, only to repeat the whole drama with the next wave.

I almost think the birds were having fun. I know we were.

Purple Sandpiper

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