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 \u2013 the familiar song that begins with clear, drawn-out, whistled notes that get faster until they fall into a bouncing cascade that\u2019s almost a trill. It\u2019s a song that used to be common here, but in the past few years has become increasingly rare.<\/p>\n
I stopped and walked closer, not sure if I was right, and fairly quickly found it \u2013 a small sparrow with a long tail, pink legs, dark brown back and wings with faint wing bars \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 if it was a song \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
As well as I could figure out later, this may have been a form of a Field Sparrow\u2019s \u201ccomplex song,\u201d 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 \u2013 but more of rather casually and quietly whistling while it worked. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s an accurate interpretation \u2013 there may have been some interaction going on that I completely missed. But I watched and listened for several minutes, and that\u2019s how it seemed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u2013 the familiar song that begins with clear, drawn-out, whistled notes that get faster until they fall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1182,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}