Saturday, March 6, 2010

Male House Sparrow

Male House Sparrow
I think I have more than mentioned that I've been seeing a lot of sparrows and starlings outside of my house lately. I do have plenty of pictures from the nature parks, and other places I've been hiking, but these birds are more fun to show you right now. Wouldn't you rather see a puffy little bird than a snow covered field right now?

Actually, the snow is all melting very fast, but I'm still having fun with the birds, so this is what I have for you. For example, the picture at the top. I caught this male house sparrow in mid-tweet! I love getting pictures of birds when their beaks are open. He was really a noisy little guy.

One odd thing about my study of birds is that while I think I'm getting good at identifying some of them, I have a lot of trouble remembering what any particular bird sounds like. I'm beginning to be able to know if it's a robin I hear, but they have a few different calls. I know a red-winged blackbird when I hear one, because they have one very beautiful sound and one very ugly one, both distinctive from other birds. For any other small bird, all I really remember so far is tweet tweet tweet. All of them the same.

Now some of you may not know much about birds, so you might want to know how I know this is a house sparrow. Well, it's because I looked it up. I'll even give you a link to where you can find out about birds too. It's WhatBird.com. This is a legitimate field guide, right on the internet. It should help you at least with North American birds, maybe more. There are plenty of other resources on the internet, but this is the one I'll share today.

And how do I know this is a male house sparrow? Uh, that link I gave you. Actually house sparrows are a good kind of bird that you can identify male from female. Some birds are almost impossible. Males, like the one in my pictures today, have a black beak with a lot of black on his throat. A female doesn't have the black throat, and her beak is a pale color. That's as technical as I'll get this time; we want to keep this fun.

Actually, I'm going to give you a little bit of fun trivia about these birds. House sparrows, in North America are not looked upon favorably. They are invasive immigrants here, much like most humans. Their population is considered to be out of control, and they are very aggressive toward other birds. They have been known to kill other types of birds for their nests, and nesting right on top of the dead bodies. Incidentally, a group of house sparrows is known as a "blight", "humiliation", or "subdivision".

This is very interesting because the house sparrows outside my house seem to always be in mixed groups with starlings, another kind of bird with a very similar bad reputation. I guess these bad boys of the bird world like to hang out with each other. It's really odd to see this little puffball in my pictures, knowing that it's really quite small, and think it could actually do any harm to any other living thing.

Let's end this on a more positive note. House sparrows are actually very social little creatures. These little birds fly right up on my porch while I'm out there. They are also willing to perch in the closer trees while I'm out taking pictures. The starlings always stay farther away than that. In Japan the sparrow is a symbol of loyalty because of their social nature. I like house sparrows.

13 comments:

  1. Love the first shot. What an adorable little guy that Sparrow is - he's just so... POOFY :o)

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  2. Interesting information on the house sparrow..and I didn't know that little cutie bird is aggressive. Great pictures, ratty!

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  3. Those are great pictures especially the one with bird in mid peep. I think the sparrows are known as the bad boys of the bird world. But they seem to do just fine around here. Wonder if they chase Chickadees away??? I love Chickadees and I haven't seen very many here around my house.

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  4. I checked out whatbird.com; it is a great reference! Thanks, I liked the ease of navigating the site. You cannot have too many bird references.

    For Marg, house sparrows will chase chickadees away but the black capped chickadee is persistent and will show up when the sparrows aren't around.

    Bill

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  5. Wow those house sparrows sure do have a bad rep. It's almost hard to believe that something so small and fluffy looking could be aggressive. I keep learning more and more about birds every time I come here. Great shots by the way.

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  6. Great photo and I like your sparrows. We get lots of house sparrows when I am being a good bird mommy and keeping the food out. They do bully the other birds. They will overtake the feeder. They also show no fear of me, unlike the other birds. They will sit and look at me like my cats do "woman, where's the food".

    They are so cute though.

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  7. My house sparrows never told such a long and interesting story.

    They thought I know everything, in fact I am not.

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  8. very interesting info about house sparrows, maybe the bad boys do gang up together :(

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  9. Glad to see the birds are returning to your area, it means they can't be far behind here. Hopefully I'll be using that link soon.

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  10. Ratty, I have a website that has bird calls ON it, so you can hear what sounds they make...it is wonderful.
    Here it is:

    http://www.allaboutbirds.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1077&&sort=&output=xml_no_dtd&&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=default_frontend&site=default_collection&proxyreload=1&sitesearch=www.allaboutbirds.org&btnG=Find&q=results#939

    You just have to put the name of the bird in there and the bird info comes up, including videos and bird calls. It is a fantastic site.
    You can get to it by just typing in:
    http://allaboutbirds.org

    Try it, you'll love it. It has ducks and geese too!

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  11. I definitely would rather see photos of yummy, puffy sparrows than snow! At first I felt guilty about the yummy part, but then you mentioned how mean and hard sparrows are. And my human has often seen them attacking mocking birds in the neighborhood. So now I don't feel bad about wanting to eat them... except I wonder if they might be a little tough and not so tasty.

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  12. I have tried very hard to like these birds over the years. They can't help where they are. But, I really haven't been able to make myself become very interested. They don't have many appealing qualities.

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  13. They are really cute in your photos Ratty but they do live up to their reputations much too often. Great shots of the little male.

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