Field Sparrow Singing – A Less Common Song
A calm, cool, crisp, exquisite spring morning, with a cloudless blue sky and winter-bare trees in a hesitant haze of palest green, like a mist. Water oaks are leafing out in pale tiny leaves; sweet gums, further along, shimmer with fresh foliage, and dogwoods hover greenish-white with blooms almost ready to open. And all these trees around our yard, and a few remaining pines, too, were filled with sparkling, quivering, delicate music – the songs of Yellow-rumped Warblers. All winter long, all they’ve expressed is dry, gray comments of check! And now, suddenly, they bloom into floral, silvery songs.
Northern Cardinal, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, Chipping Sparrow, Brown Thrasher, Louisiana Waterthrush, and Ruby-crowned Kinglet also sang – and a Black-and-white Warbler sang weesa-weesa-weesa. A couple of Mourning Doves and three Dark-eyed Juncos searched for seeds under the feeders in the front yard. A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker flew to the trunk of a pecan tree. A pair of Downy Woodpeckers tapped on branches and worked on one of the feeders. A Red-bellied Woodpecker called quurrrr.
But the real gift of the morning was the bright, cheery, bouncing song of a Field Sparrow, a series of clear whistled notes followed by several falling notes that are usually described as a trill, but sound to me like the tap-tap-tap-tapping of a ping-pong ball. The Field Sparrow perched in the limbs of a young red maple tree, among new young red leaves, a very small, plain, ordinary-looking, brown-streaked sparrow with a soft rusty cap, a gray and rusty face and thin white eye-ring, and a small pink bill and pink legs.
A common bird of old fields, pastures and clearings, the Field Sparrow used to be a bird I heard and saw often. It’s an old and familiar friend. But in recent years, I have found them less and less often, so when I hear or see one now, I notice it more. While still considered widespread in eastern North America, populations of Field Sparrows are known to be declining, probably because of loss of the brushy, weedy habitat they need. They like weeds and open fields – and fade away when subdivisions, lawns and street lights replace the open, untended spaces.
I don’t know why this one was here, and doubt it will stay, but it was a pleasure to hear and see it passing through.