Sparrows

Two weekends ago, we were at the end of the rush of migration here in the Northeast. Migration involves hundreds of different species of birds, but what most birders focus on are the warblers, those small, often colorful songsters who perch, maddeningly, at the tops of trees (causing what is known as warbler-neck). I had been gearing up for migration for what seemed a long time, the lull of winter where I had to content myself with cardinals, a tufted titmouse, the cheerful chickadees. I’m new to birding, so I waited for migration with excitement—all those new birds—and dread—would I be able to identify anything? I was pleased when the song of the black-throated green warbler sounded familiar to me, and when I heard a parula nearby. I pished in a blue winged warbler and heard many chestnut-sided warblers.

One day this spring, a young man posted that he had seen a Cape May warbler at a local area known as Ferncliff Forest. I decided to stop into the park for a morning walk. When I stepped out of my car I felt like I was in an aviary, the tall deciduous trees like a canopy containing the songs of hundreds of birds. I wandered, dazed and disoriented trying hard to identify the most basic songs. Discouraged, I left the park after two and a half hours. Birding takes time. Birding takes patience.

And now, in a flash, the warblers have seemingly come and gone. The blackpoll warbler brings up the rear end of the charge, signaling the end of these holy birding days. They are here. The woods are still lively, but much more quiet. I can pull out the song of the scarlet tanager, the pewee, the brown thrasher.

Still, some are trying to extend the joy (or frustration) of migration by traveling to particular areas. A group of our local birders drove to what is known as Doodletown where they were sure to find cerulean warblers (made famous, perhaps, in Jonathan Franzen’s compelling novel Freedom). But Peter decided he wanted to capture another family of migrants: the sparrows.

Peter loves sparrows. He takes gorgeous photographs, but none hang on his walls at home except for the photograph of the Nelson’s sparrow he found locally (a rarity in this region). There it is with its orange yellow head, and grey cheek patches. Finding the Nelson’s is a story I have heard a few times, that quick moment of realization that before him was an unusual sparrow. When Peter and I traveled to Maine last summer we got up before dawn for days to seek out a Nelson’s. When he finally heard one—its call like a rising spit from the tall grass—his face lit up with a joy I have rarely seen.  

Sparrows are LBJs—little brown jobs.  Many long-time birders confess that their passion stops at the sparrows. To know sparrows you have to pay keen attention to an eye line, a wing bar, a buff chest, a cap with a line of yellow. Unlike the flashy warblers, sparrows seem to come in one color—brown. But once you pay attention that brown has many shades, like the rufus fox sparrow. They seem like uniformly small birds. But once you pay attention some are larger than others, some have longer tails. Unlike the warbler, whose songs can be a lot of fun, the sparrow often gives a chirp, or a song that is so high some people (like me) cannot register the sound. In short--for a new birder, sparrows spell despair.

Still, on an overcast spring Sunday Peter wanted to seek out the migrants no one was paying attention to and I agreed to the ride. “Everyone is chasing warblers, but there are a lot of other birds moving through.” Off we went to open farmland in Dutchess County in search of sparrows.

First there was the Savannah sparrow, close by the road in a tuft of grass. They will stick around for the summer. Out in the field of asparagus, Peter heard the song of the Vesper Sparrow. “That’s not a song sparrow?” I asked, as the first beats felt familiar. “Listen,” Peter said, pointing toward where we had heard the song emerge from the earth. I listened. To be honest, without him to direct my ear, I would have passed the bird by. The large sparrow perched on an asparagus frond and looked at us. “See the white eye ring,” Peter coached.(The bird at the top of the post is a Vesper, photo take by Peter.)

At the far end of the field, Peter stopped. “There it is,” he said. In a rush, he broke through a line of shrubs, and popped into a neighboring field, the grass there higher.  The distinctive, high spit of the grasshopper—I could just hear it—emerged. In looking at the details of the bird, its short tail and buff-colored breast, I could see how sweet—yes, sweet—this little bird was. To note all of these small-scale details took an extraordinary attention, an almost religious devotion to the subtle.  It is the sort of attention perfected by love. And that is what I saw in Peter’s eyes as he focused on the bird, lifted his camera to his eyes to save the image of this little bird, heading north for the summer.