GRASS SPARROWS OF ANOTHER TIME

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

No matter how much whitewashing I do in my bird identification course, sparrows sure ain’t easy to identify! There are more than a dozen sparrow species, commonly recognized as such, in Prince Edward County, and twice that many in the entire family which includes towhees, buntings, longpurs and juncos.

To conquer the 12 or more sparrows, it is necessary to become very intimate with them, by learning their mannerisms, their habitat, and especially, their songs, for all of them are quite different. What is difficult is explaining those differences to new birders when their songs are heard in the field. We had one such opportunity last week when during an organized hike on the Millennium Trail between Closson Road and Wellington, we had a chance to compare two species that were singing together at the same time.

One of my fondest memories of the farm was walking back our laneway in the evening to bring in the cows for milking, for that was the time when vesper sparrows were at their peak. They nested in the hayfields, but as their name suggests, sang enthusiastically during the evening hours. I am not sure how I first associated the plaintive song with the picture in the book for there surely were no bird song recordings as we have today. Perhaps it the song, then the flash of white outer tail feathers as the bird selected another perch from which to continue its delivery. They are the only sparrow species that flashes white outer tail feathers when it flies.

Hearing one always takes me back to those days more than 40 years ago. They were common, but today, are rarely heard as their preferred habitat of small, open hay fields, bordered by trees and shrubs, is a rapidly disappearing feature of our rural landscape. Small fields are giving way to much larger fields and important fence rows which they prefer from which to finish the day in song, are vanishing. That’s why it was a surprise to hear not one, but at least four individual vesper sparrows singing along the Millennium Trail that day, singing energetically during the day because it was dark and overcast. Where vesper sparrows still breed, early hay harvesting destroys nests, as it occasionally did on our farm, and feral cats and other rogue predators on the prowl discover their tiny cup nests unprotected on the ground.

The vesper sparrows on our farm though would do their best at luring us away, often springing from their nests and somersaulting along uncontrollably as they attempted to draw our attention away from their nests. It has not been an easy life for these members of the sparrow family, and now we are seeing the results of that struggle translating into declining numbers. Yet, when I penned Birds of Prince Edward County in 1969, I described it as a "common resident", and even in the revised edition of the same book in 1984, the bird was still considered a common summer resident in Prince Edward County.

Peterson, and many other references, describes the vesper sparrow’s song as throatier song than that of the song sparrow. Personally, I see little resemblance. If I were to compare it to anything it would be to a field sparrow, starting out with two or three slowly delivered sweet notes, and instead of bouncing along like the ping pong notes of the field sparrow, ends quickly in a jumble of notes as though the bird lost its interest in producing a recognizable song, and just let the remainder of the notes tumble out uncontrollably. All books try hard to describe the last part of the song and they come up with everything from a bubbly descending trill to slurred jumbled notes. The ROM Field Guide actually went out on a limb, so to speak, and made an admirable attempt to put words to the song, "Here, here, where, where, altogether-down-the-hill." Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, as do most bird mnemonics, but is the best description I have seen yet.

Sometimes it preferable not to fret over trying to describe the song of the vesper sparrow. Just close your eyes, as I did that day, and let your mind drift back to an earlier time when every rural fencerow had a vesper sparrow throwing back its head and delighting us with its rich, plaintive song. I miss those days, as I do the days when loggerhead shrikes commonly nested on our farm, and purple finches crowded around our bird feeders, numbering 70 or more. Efforts are being made to create suitable habitat for declining birds like loggerhead shrikes and Henslow’s sparrows, but in the end when numbers reach such a low point, what have we really accomplished?