The Song Sparrows Stayed!

A wild song sparrow sings in Fairyland. 

This is the most current installment in the story of three orphaned song sparrows I raised upon receiving them August 30, 2021. You can find the prior three by scrolling down or hitting "Older Post." 

 The challenge I would face going forward was keeping track of my three song sparrow babies, who were, amazingly enough, hanging around through the autumn and early winter! 

This was worthy of note because I don't often have song sparrows here in winter--they seem to clear out. So to have three hanging around, and those being birds I'd raised, was an embarrassment of riches for me. 

I had expected them to take off soon after release, but they didn't. Fall migration time was already in full swing when they were hatched, for crying out loud--they fledged on August 31. 

As I thought more about it, it occurred to me that perhaps they were up against a metabolic wall. For no sooner had their juvenile plumage grown in than they--perhaps prompted by shorter daylength and the ebb in hormones that produces--began to molt it out. There were little feathers all over the fledging tent. They looked scruffy as could be. 

And it occurred to me that they may have been in no shape to attempt fall migration. Perhaps they had no choice but to stay the fall and winter with me here. Just born too late.

That was fine with me. I could help them through the winter. 

Baby, October 12, 2021. This is such a classic Baby pose. 

Lots of pinfeathers over her eye!

Baby, October 17, 2021. Still showing pinfeathers under the eye (click on photo to see).

About a zillion photos later, I finally got two of them together. 

Imagine my surprise and delight when both Baby and Ball showed up together in the side yard on December 16, 2021! This is a crummy picture, but you can make out the fault bars on both their tails.

It had to be Baby and Ball, because Bob had lost his first tail to a chipmunk, and had grown in a perfect one.

What better Christmas present could there be than Ball, singing away on December 26,  2021, down along the meadow edge?

My baby boy is singing!! And I caught him at it! See the little pale bar on his tail?? That's diagnostic of my hand-raised babies. He looks wonderful, doesn't he?

When the ice storm hit in February, somebody turned up tailless. Oh jeez. Ice will pull out bird tails. It happens. I didn't know who it was. One of the three. Maybe Baby. Maybe Bob, again. Feb. 5, 2022

Whoever it was liked to hang out close to the studio window. How sweet!!

I'm kinda leaning toward Bob here. Feb. 6, 2022. Telling song sparrows apart with neither bands nor bar-marked tails is above my pay grade. I try, but I'm never sure. 

They liked dried mealworms, and I was only too glad to toss more out the window. 

Grow that little tail back, fast!!

And then, after I photographed the tailless one, here came one with a bar-marked tail, sitting right in the Zick Dough feeder, pigging out! Ball? Is that you? Baby?? I'm lost. 

All I know is you're one of mine. And you're either Baby or Ball. If I can photograph you singing, I'll know you're Ball, because I'm pretty sure Baby's a female. Feb. 5, 2022

And so it goes for a Science Chimp and bird mom, forever watching, scrutinizing, photographing. Obsessively confirming, over and over, yes, you still draw breath, my dear ones.

It would be ever so much easier if I could band them, wouldn't it?

It's good to be pretty much caught up, to have followed these three for six months!

What a gift! 

I am looking forward to tracking down and photographing any song sparrow that sings, hops or scratches

on my place as spring comes on. I sure hope to see one with a marked tail. Maybe two.

You never know what little present awaits when you walk out the door. 

Latest sightings: Ball(?) turned up in the ZickDough feeder for the Great Backyard Bird Count on Feb. 19. I was so happy to see him. And he's been singing his distinctive scratchy song right under my bedroom window, Feb. 19 and 20 at first hint of light. He sings once, then takes off from his night roost in the blue spruce by the fishpond and sings farther down in the back, below the fallen willow. What a wonderful start to my day, to hear a bird singing who I've known since he was 8 days old!

On Feb. 24, Ball sang from the steps of my front porch. Oh, how I hope he establishes a territory and stays to breed here! 

Speaking of gifts...On the 28th of September, I was sitting in my lawn chair, clicking away at the babies as they fed on the sidewalk, when someone else came hopping up. My eye, well trained, knew instantly that this was no song sparrow. Please click on the photos to see the fine penciling of a gorgeous fall Lincoln's sparrow, come down from the squishy bogs of the North Country to grace my yard, and feed on millet for one glorious September morning. 

Such are the gifts of being outside, and looking closely. Swoon! Feast your eyes on that ochre wash across malar and breast! The clean gull-gray above the eye! That white belly! Oh, what a bird!