Are song sparrows moving/migrating yet

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Betty nancy bee

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Aug 31, 2021, 3:28:25 PM8/31/21
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This morning I heard an unfamiliar song sparrow song that caught my attention. I wondered if it might be a migrating individual. 

Travel and nature blog: https://nancybird375.wordpress.com/

Lisa Millbank

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Aug 31, 2021, 4:33:09 PM8/31/21
to Betty nancy bee, Mid-Valley Nature
This is definitely on the early side for most migrating Song Sparrows, but Cornell's animated migration map shows that there is some movement starting in late August, mostly birds retreating from northern BC and Alberta.  Over the last week or so, I've heard a few high-pitched "seet" flight calls at night that sound like sparrow calls, but I don't know which species (or if I'm wrong about them being sparrows).

One more likely possibility is that the Song Sparrow you heard is a young male practicing his singing.  Each young male has to spend months perfecting multiple song variations that he's picked up by listening to adult males.  But the little guys are very enthusiastic and eager to practice, and they sound funny and awkward before they master the songs.  One clue is that the young males often sing pretty quietly while in dense cover.  I love catching them in the act of practicing; the more terrible their singing sounds, the cuter it is to me.

If you get the opportunity to track down the singer, see if he looks like one of our typical rusty-looking Song Sparrows.  There are a lot of subspecies, and some of the northern coastal ones are also pretty dark, but you might see one whose coloration is more of a chocolate brown, is grayer, has more white, or possibly one whose streaking is tidier and less diffuse than the residents around here.  Of course, it's possible that the bird could be a young male of a different subspecies, who is practicing his songs while on migration.

Lisa Millbank

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 12:28 PM Betty nancy bee <bee....@gmail.com> wrote:
This morning I heard an unfamiliar song sparrow song that caught my attention. I wondered if it might be a migrating individual. 

Travel and nature blog: https://nancybird375.wordpress.com/

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Mary Garrard

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Aug 31, 2021, 6:28:40 PM8/31/21
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Wow, Lisa, that is an awesome animation!  I had no idea it was there. There are probably a dozen other things I don’t know about what eBird has to offer.. I could spend a lot of time just mesmerized plugging in different species. 

On the theme of migration, I had been hearing Swainson’s Thrush "wheep” calls in the early  morning.

Mary




Joel Geier

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Aug 31, 2021, 8:39:57 PM8/31/21
to Mary Garrard, Mid-Valley Nature
Hi all,

I've pointed this out previously, but one should be a little careful about these tremendously detailed animated maps. Sort of like the old adage about legislation and making sausage, the product is much prettier than what goes into them!

If you slow down the animated videos, you'll notice that many tiny, discontiguous areas in Alberta, which appear to have Song Sparrows in early August, blink out in unison as the weeks advance. These are generally areas where there are very few observers. In some cases, these changes might reflect disappearance of Song Sparrows from as few as one or two yards or observation sites, across an area 50 or 100 km wide.

eBird is using a bit of a trick to create these visualizations in areas where data and observers are sparse or absent. The assumption is that if you have a few observation points in a particular type of habitat (say, "spruce bog"), within a particular range of latitude/longitude, those observations can be extrapolated to guess what happens in all similar patches of habitat, in the same lat/long range.

The effect is visually more impressive than eBird's first efforts to produce this type of visualization, which used a spatial interpolation ("smoothing") method based mainly on distance to the nearest observation (rather than land cover types).  That previous method produced some strange effects, like Swainson's Thrushes which seemed to migrate up into Manitoba in spring only to drip back into North Dakota, like a glob of colored wax in a lava lamp. But the underlying problem of sparse observations in many regions is still there.

The other thing to beware of in these visualizations is more psychological/perceptive than analytical. Our eyes and brains naturally infer a direction of movement from these animations, just as we mentally fill in the movement between stop-motion frames of old Mickey Mouse cartoons. It's kind of a fascinating phenomenon, how we're able to do this! But it's not real, when we apply it to these type of data.

All that the data really say is that a few observers in some area, say, 100 km north of Calgary, weren't seeing Song Sparrows in a given week where they saw them previously. Whether this represents actual migration or just post-breeding dispersal away from breeding habitat (something that we commonly observe with sparrows right here in the mid-valley), it's doubtful that eBird can discriminate.

As the saying goes, "Seeing is believing!" ... but sometimes these slick animations can fool our hunter-gatherer brains!

Joel

From: "Mary Garrard" <spring...@gmail.com>
To: "Mid-Valley Nature" <mid-vall...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2021 3:28:37 PM
Subject: Re: [MidValleyNature:6109] Are song sparrows moving/migrating yet

Harry Fuller

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Aug 31, 2021, 8:54:47 PM8/31/21
to Betty nancy bee, Mid-Valley Nature
several things can be happening now with Song Sparrows...some losing their homes to fire and seeking clean air...as Lisa says, young males sounding off but they won't get the whole song down until next spring...the usual late summer dispersal, esp. of first year birds, this is when you might see a young Setller's Jay in an oak tree even

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 12:28 PM Betty nancy bee <bee....@gmail.com> wrote:
This morning I heard an unfamiliar song sparrow song that caught my attention. I wondered if it might be a migrating individual. 

Travel and nature blog: https://nancybird375.wordpress.com/

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Harry Fuller
author of: San Francisco's Natural History: Sand Dunes to Streetcars:
author of Freeway Birding: freewaybirding.com
birding website: http://www.towhee.net
my birding blog: atowhee.wordpress.com

nancy bee

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Sep 1, 2021, 6:07:22 PM9/1/21
to Harry Fuller, Mid-Valley Nature
Would the males whose territory I live in still be singing this late in the summer?

I guess I don’t know if I’ve been hearing the resident males this last few weeks  but tuned them out and stopped hearing them. And then this new song showed up and woke me up and shifted my attention from human affairs to avian affairs. 

All I know for sure is, all of a sudden I was hearing a song sparrow. 



Nancy (Betty) Bee

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu

On Aug 31, 2021, at 5:54 PM, Harry Fuller <ato...@gmail.com> wrote:



Joel Geier

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Sep 1, 2021, 6:37:56 PM9/1/21
to Nancy Baumeister, Mid-Valley Nature
Hi Nancy and all,

As we approach the fall equinox, there's a phenomenon referred to as the "autumnal recrudescence" in which birds apparently experience a brief surge of reproductive hormones, triggered by the day length being similar to that around the spring equinox, which can prompt brief bouts of singing, territoriality, and in some cases even nest-building (though rarely if ever extending to the point of egg-laying and incubation).

I seem to recall seeing some research which suggested an additional function of fall singing by neotropical migrants, as preparation for staking out winter territories.

Yesterday I heard a Wilson's Warbler singing for the first time in several months -- hard to say if it was an early migrant from farther north, or a dispersing bird from the near edge of the Coast Range.

I rarely hear sparrows singing spontaneously at this time of year, except for young birds trying out their voices, as Lisa mentioned, or Zonotrichia sparrows (White-crowns etc.) which sing year-round as part of their complex social behaviors. In the ongoing study of "Oregon" Vesper Sparrows, we sometimes use recordings of songs to check which birds are still around on nesting sites as a way to measure fledgling survival & dispersal patterns. It seems like hatch-year juveniles are much more likely to show interest/curiosity in a recording at this time of year, compared with older birds who tend to show little if any interest.

Happy (almost) autumn!
Joel

From: "Nancy Baumeister" <bee....@gmail.com>
To: "Harry Fuller" <ato...@gmail.com>
Cc: "Mid-Valley Nature" <mid-vall...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 1, 2021 3:06:03 PM
Subject: Re: [MidValleyNature:6113] Are song sparrows moving/migrating yet

Holly Platz

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Sep 1, 2021, 9:59:47 PM9/1/21
to Joel Geier, Nancy Baumeister, Mid-Valley Nature
Hi all,
I generally just lurk here, but had to say something when I read what you said, Joel, about Zonotrichia sparrows singing year-round due to their complex social structure—how cool is that! I’ve noticed WCSparrows singing out of season in Oregon, and have observed White-throated Sparrows singing in winter here in Texas, but I never realized it was a “Zono thing”. Thanks!
Good birding,

Holly Platz
San Antonio, TX (formerly Eugene then Corvallis) 

On Sep 1, 2021, at 5:37 PM, Joel Geier <clear...@peak.org> wrote:



Joel Geier

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Sep 2, 2021, 9:30:37 PM9/2/21
to Holly Platz, Nancy Baumeister, Mid-Valley Nature
Hi Holly,

Great to hear from you! About Zonotrichia sparrows, I should give credit to Lisa for sharing some great information about their flock behaviors, a few years back (I think some of this went into a Neighborhood Naturalist newsletter). "Zono" flocks are really a lot like little chicken flocks, if you spend time watching them. I guess juncos can be counted in that group as closely related birds with complex flock behaviors, though perhaps not in terms of singing.

Joel

From: "Holly Platz" <holly...@gmail.com>
To: "clearwater" <clear...@peak.org>
Cc: "Nancy Baumeister" <bee....@gmail.com>, "Mid-Valley Nature" <mid-vall...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 1, 2021 6:44:18 PM
Subject: Re: [MidValleyNature:6114] Are song sparrows moving/migrating yet
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