Re: Breeding range of House Wren

["Robin Carter" <rcarter@sc.rr.com>]

A very good place to find information about where birds breed in South
Carolina is the South Carolina Breeding Bird Atlas, which is on the web at
www.dnr.state.sc.us/wild/bbatlas/bba.html

Many commercial CD-ROM bird guides and printed field guides, even some very
good ones, refuse to incorporate the latest data about where birds breed in
the Carolinas. For example many guides have maps which refuse to acknowledge
that the Blue-headed Vireo breeds throughout the Piedmont of North and South
Carolina. This has been know for many years -- at least since the 1960's,
but most field guide maps show the species breeding only in the mountains of
our states.

In the South Carolina Piedmont the House Wren has an interesting
distribution.  Right up next to the mountains, say in Greenville or Pickens
Counties above 1500 feet elevation, you might find a few House Wrens
breeding in the country. For most of the South Carolina Piedmont, however,
the House Wren, like the Song Sparrow, is a city bird. This is a bird of
old, well- settled neighborhoods where folks still have back yard vegetable
gardens and still put out wren boxes.

Occasionally we find a House Wren in summer in a clear cut in the South
Carolina Coastal Plain, but they do not regularly breed in this kind of
habitat in most of the state.

Robin Carter
Columbia, SC
rcarter@sc.rr.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Linda Sharp" <nljsharp@worldnet.att.net>
To: "Carolina birds posting" <carolinabirds@duke.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 9:12 PM
Subject: Breeding range of House Wren


> I have had a lone house wren in my yard for about 3 weeks now that sings
> up a song for hours every morning, I was sort of happy to see him
> because he's a new yard bird for me.  It appears to be a male trying to
> attract a mate. I read in my Thayer's birding guide that the male starts
> a nest while trying to attract a female, and it appears that he has
> started to build a nest in a wren house in my yard. I looked in several
> birding guides for the breeding range of this bird and it varies from
> book to book from the North Carolina State line near the mountains to
> just below it in upstate South Carolina. My question is does this bird
> normally breed in upstate South Carolina? I was thinking he was having
> so much trouble finding a mate because he's outside of his breeding
> range.
>
> --
> Linda Sharp
> Greenville, SC
> nljsharp@worldnet.att.net
>