Following Barb's Backyard Bird Focus, we pressed on with our Outdoor Hour Challenge this week, despite two inches of new white snow.
We read about cardinals and house sparrows, and I finally believe that I can confidently say that the little birds that come to my feeder so often are house sparrows. I'd looked them up many times, but promptly forgotten what I'd discovered. This time, however, focusing on one bird at a time, I've finally internalized what I read.
There are so many nondescript little brownish birds around. I know, it's not really true, but until I started looking closely, all I could say was that maybe it was a sparrow or a finch or some other little common bird. In fact, I had a mental picture of a sparrow in my mind that was completely wrong: it was too slender, too delicate, too small. What was I thinking?
Well, now I know. These little sparrows have rusty caps, tiny little bibs below their bills, brown streaky wings and lighter brown bellies. And those bellies are very round. There is almost no neck length on a sparrow (something I had wrong in my mental picture), although you can definitely see the indentation that separates head from body.
We are now confidently identifying house sparrows all over our neighbourhood. And we're even starting to be able to pick out their calls among all the other bird sounds we're hearing these days!
We haven't put entries in our Nature Journals yet for these little fellows, but we have done our cardinals. I'll put pictures of both in my next post on the Challenge.
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