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Re: English Ivy and birds






On Sun, 23 Jan 2000, Joshua Stuart Rose wrote:

>. And the 
> sparrow I mentioned a few days ago, or another much like it, came by 
> today; as much as the face and crown suggest Swamp or Lincoln's Sparrow, 
> the rest of the body is classic Song Sparrow. Which is probably what the 
> entire bird is, just with unusually much gray on the face.

It's intriguing to speculate on where the gray and tan song sparrow came
from. Having just moved here from Washington state (where I studied song
sparrows), I know that one person's "classic Song Sparrow" can look
bizarre to someone who's used to a different "classic Song Sparrow."  No
matter how much gray and tan your bird had, Josh, I'll wager it would look
clean, crisp and contrasty compared to the "rusty" race, Melospiza melodia
morphna, that I'm used to.  For a couple western interior song sparrows of
intermediate grayness, see here:

	http://donb.photo.net/browse/data/birds_176.html

Those birds are still about six shades lighter than what I'm used to.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture of a true _morphna_ on the web to
point to.

I don't recommend trying to ID wintering song sparrows to subspecies in
the field - I think it's impossible - but I bet your bird just wandered in
from somewhere different.  For all we know, it's the rufous hummingbird of
song sparrows.  Which makes it just another of the unsolved mysteries that
makes birding interesting.

Chris Hill
Conway, SC