Animals Announce their Presence in Spring: Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina)

 

Male Chipping Sparrow singing in Springtime.
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2015. All rights reserved

Springtime can be a particularly fruitful time for discovering new species in one's yard, especially new species of birds. Spring is the time when male birds of many species are loudly announcing their presence with their songs, often performed in the most highly visible location they can find in the hope of attracting a mate. All one needs to do, therefore, to find a new species in one's yard is to listen for an unfamiliar bird song and catch a glimpse of the bird singing it. As an added bonus, spring is the time when most of them have their full breeding plumage offering the brightest color of the year.

Popular apps like iBird Pro 2 not only have drawings and photos of bird species, but also allow you to listen to the song to see if it matches what you're hearing in the field. It is an absolute clincher for tentative identifications. For example, This morning, I heard a long trilling song from about 50 feet up in a pine tree in my front yard. I got my camera and zoomed in to the location from which the song emanated and got two very mediocre shots of a small brown bird.

As many of you know, there are a great number of small brown birds. As it happens, though, I got enough in the photo to determine that it was almost certainly a sparrow. I could see a greyish-white underside in one photo and in the other I could see a pronounced rufous-colored cap, bordered by white then a black eye line. By typing sparrow into the iBird Pro 2 App on my phone (I also have it on my Kindle Fire), I chose a likely candidate from the thumbnail images of all sparrows. It looked like a Chipping Sparrow, but the photos weren't great, so maybe it could have been an American Tree Sparrow. To settle between the two, I used the app to play the song of the Chipping Sparrow. It was an exact match to what I heard up in the tree. Case closed, and another species, Spizella passerine, is added to the list of animals that live in my yard.

Quick facts about the Chipping Sparrow

Q: When can the Chipping Sparrow be found in New Hampshire?
A: According to Spring Arrival Dates Revisited by Pam Hunt, Chipping Sparrows most often arrive in early April after having spent the winter months in the southernmost tier of states (from Southern California to South Virginia) and Mexico.

Q: What does the Chipping Sparrow eat?
A: I often see chipping sparrows foraging on the ground for seeds and insects. They will also visit feeders and take suet and most common bird seed.

Q: What kind of nests to Chipping Sparrows build?
A: They build nests of grasses, small plant stems and similar stringy materials woven into a thin cup-shaped nest. The cup is then lined with softer material such as animal fur. At our house, we have a long-haired dog and whenever we brush out her coat she sheds lots of hair. We leave this outside on the ground and it is often incorporated into bird nests around our yard.

Q: What do their eggs look like?
A: Chipping Sparrow eggs are a light blue-green in color with darker brown or black spots usually more pronounced on the fatter end. They usually lay between 2-7 eggs that take 10-15 days to hatch, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Cornell also says Chipping Sparrows may hatch between one and three sets of eggs each year.

With the addition of song identification, the two photos
shown on this blog entry are enough to positively ID
the Chipping Sparrow.
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2015, all rights reserved.

Taxonomy of the Chipping Sparrow

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Emerizidae
Genus: Spizella
Species: Spizella passerine