Hey everyone, it's Bobby from LycoBirds, and this video is going to be a quick walkthrough
example of how to identify this Song Sparrow. For context, the photo was taken during the
month of January in north central Pennsylvania. So, what do we notice first about this bird?
Well it's pretty heavily streaked on the underside, so that, in the winter,
narrows this down to just a few species and Song Sparrow is actually the place you want to start,
and you're looking for features to either confirm that or something that would lead us away to
one of the other options. So, the streaking looks pretty brown and pretty much the the entire body
looks more brown than red. So something like Fox Sparrow is probably not a great option
on this bird. Fox Sparrows in the east are very red, so.... The streaking is also somewhat messy;
I wouldn't say it's crisp. And, typically Song Sparrows have a spot, kind of in the
middle of the chest. I wouldn't say that this individual is showing that very strongly.
I think you can kind of see it a little bit here, but it's not as noticeable as a lot of them tend
to show, but that's variable and it's not really a cause for concern with the identification.
We also see kind of this bold dark wedge in the
throat area - just outside the central part of the throat - and Song Sparrows tend to show this
more strongly than some of the other options like Savannah Sparrow or Lincoln's Sparrow.
And we can also see this tail is very long and kind of reddish tones in the tail. So if we
compare this to something like a Savannah Sparrow look how much shorter the tail is on this bird
compared to this. And really, these two species are somewhat superficially similar - other than
this individual obviously has pretty strong yellow in the eye area. That's variable on
Savannah Sparrows; this is one of the brighter ones. But you can just see how much structural
difference there is between these two. So, again, that favors Song Sparrow on this bird
and if we want to compare to Lincoln's Sparrow, which really is the the remaining streaked sparrow
that we haven't really talked about too much... look at how crisp and just delicate the streaking
is on a Lincoln's Sparrow. And also the base color of the chest and the sides on a Lincoln's Sparrow
is decidedly buffy, and there's a pretty strong contrast between the chest and the sides versus
the belly. And you see on this bird, the base color of the underside is pretty much uniform.
So, all of that leads us to conclude that this looks fine for a Song Sparrow. Like I said,
it's the expected streaked sparrow species at the location in the winter - and really all
year long - so there's nothing to lead us away, and we can be confident in that identification.
So I hope this walkthrough was helpful for you and gives you more confidence when you're trying to
identify sparrows that you're seeing. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.