A Field Sparrow’s Quiet Complex Song
The most interesting find of the morning was a Field Sparrow singing in an oak tree in an overgrown area across the road from the old field. Its song first caught my attention as I was walking past – the familiar song that begins with clear, drawn-out, whistled notes that get faster until they fall into a bouncing cascade that’s almost a trill. It’s a song that used to be common here, but in the past few years has become increasingly rare.
I stopped and walked closer, not sure if I was right, and fairly quickly found it – a small sparrow with a long tail, pink legs, dark brown back and wings with faint wing bars – and a white-ringed eye and pink bill. It was moving over the branches of a water oak, and appeared to be eating catkins and singing as it went.
Or maybe it was humming, if sparrows can be said to hum, because after the first full, familiar song, the sparrow changed to a quite different pattern of notes. This song – if it was a song – was more melodious, rather soft, and more varied than the usual song, a mix of soft whistles, trills and some chip notes. Instead of perching on a branch delivering its song with purpose, the Field Sparrow seemed to be just kind of whistling different phrases to itself as it moved around the branches, eating catkins.
As well as I could figure out later, this may have been a form of a Field Sparrow’s “complex song,” most often heard at dawn, though sometimes at other times of day. In this song, the cascade of bouncing notes comes first, followed by slower, down-slurred whistles, and the pattern of phrases can be more varied. In this particular case, the Field Sparrow gave the impression not of territorial defense or any aggressive purpose – but more of rather casually and quietly whistling while it worked. I don’t know if that’s an accurate interpretation – there may have been some interaction going on that I completely missed. But I watched and listened for several minutes, and that’s how it seemed.