poking around on the internet and you can convince yourself you have anything. And yes, it is generally better to trust someone, say a doctor who spent several years studying how the human body works, and even more years in practice, working with the practicalities of how to recognize and treat certain conditions, than to draw your own conclusions. Still, I am convinced I have a very rare neurological disorder called passerellidae prosopagnosia, or in more common terms, sparrow blindness. I may have actually discovered it.
The symptoms were re-confirmed for me the other day when I was birding around the open field known as the Back 40 at Fort Zachary Taylor with Rowan Gibson, a young birder who’d just finished a six-week stint counting raptors at the Florida Keys Hawkwatch. There were swallows zipping around everywhere, and the newly returned kettles of turkey vultures were all flying low because the sky was gunmetal overcast and there weren’t any thermals for them to ride.
We were both keeping an eye on the ever-growing brush pile at the south end of the field when Rowan pointed out a clay-colored sparrow in the brush.
It turns out there was a pair of clay-colored sparrows. And it took me a few minutes to get on the birds, but I did eventually find them in my binoculars.
For a while they lurked deep in the brush pile, but then they hopped up onto the leafy branches of a small tree.
Rowan, who lives in Wisconsin, knew the call and the bird on sight, probably because Wisconsin is in their breeding range.
I knew they were sparrows, but it would have taken me some time with a field guide, and with a lot of hemming and hawing, to get to the species. I’d actually seen clay-colored sparrows before, but I just didn’t recognize them.
North American sparrows are a symphony of browns and other earth tones, all of them reminiscent of the color palette of terrible sweaters I owned in the 1970s. They tend to lack the distinctive and definitive field marks of more colorful species, and they all have ostensibly similar shapes. A lot of less serious birders up north refer to them as LBBs, or little brown birds, and leave it at that.
This bird wasn’t unattractive, but it wasn’t particularly visually dynamic either. It had a long dark tail, flight feathers that were the same shade of dark in the middle and a kind of whiskey-hued taupe edge that, I guess, you could call clay-colored, depending on the type of clay. Further up, toward the neck, there was a series of longitudinal streaks that alternated between the same near-black and taupe tones as the on the flight feathers.
The other thing about North American sparrows is we don’t see them very often here. You might see one or two species a year, the sightings spaced out just enough that you have time to forget whatever you thought you knew about recognizing the bird.
The word sparrow comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for fluttering. It was a word brought over from England and applied to New World sparrows because they looked kind of like Old World sparrows, despite not being closely related.
The Latin name for the species is Spizella pallida, spizella meaning little finch, and pallida meaning pale, colorless and pallid, I guess categorizing the clay-colored sparrow as the dull-looking bird of dull-looking birds. (Their words, not mine.)
Despite its prosaic exterior, it turns out the clay-colored sparrow is a rather interesting species.
Their breeding range is mostly interior Canadian, but dipping down into some of the border states. The only place they breed near salt water is a couple spots on Hudson Bay.
They are complete migrants, meaning the entire population abandons their breeding range, migrates through the Great Plains, and winters in southern Texas and Mexico.
The clay-colored sparrow is actually a relative latecomer to the North America species list, having not been described to science until 1827. Maybe it was less common back in the day, or perhaps it failed to catch anyone’s eye.
The old ornithological journals are littered with one-off sightings of them in various states outside their range – Massachusetts, South Carolina, New Jersey. The first recorded sighting in Florida was in 1932 by a visiting bird enthusiast who promptly shot the bird and, not being totally sure what species it was, shipped the skin off to noted ornithologist Whitmer Stone. Stone sent back a note stating, “There is no doubt about it being a clay-colored sparrow (S. pallida). I compared it carefully with our series of this and allied forms and it agrees exactly with specimens from North Dakota.”
In theory, clay-coloreds shouldn’t be in Florida, but enough of them stray that they get seen in ones and threes across the peninsula, with a total of maybe 100 birds sighted a year, making them uncommon but not rare.
I found one paper by a Canadian ornithologist who studied 12 breeding pairs on about 15 acres of grassland habitat near Saskatchewan. He described a lot of things, such as how the sparrows spread out between 20 and 900 meters apart, with average gaps being about 400 meters. He described how the nests were built by the females, mostly in the morning, and how the males would chase other sparrows out of their territory, but would leave larger, more aggressive species, such as eastern kingbirds, alone.
He also had some more precise observations, such as, “One copulation was observed on 7 June 1959. The female crouched in a soliciting posture with head and tail slightly raised and wings vibrating; the male approached, hovered momentarily and dropped upon her while the female uttered a tit, tit, tit call.”
A notable observation not just in the logistics of the birds’ rituals, but also as an example of how semantics and diction can drift over the decades.
Looking at the two clay-colored sparrows at Fort Zach the other morning, I started to gain a little appreciation for the birds, to see them as handsome creatures just trying to go about their day in this far-flung land, who didn’t need the thirst flash of, say, warblers.
I just hope I manage to recognize the species the next time I see it.
