Refreshingly unique

Quick, name some small, fluttery birds around here this time of year with white eyebrows and a black line through the eye. You just spotted one hiding on its nest in dense foliage. No fair reading the captions of the pictures that accompany this article, either. But you may look through your field guide.

Let’s make a list. First of all, I said small, and since the swifts and hummingbirds in our area don’t have this type of face, and the shorebirds are too big, we can skip right to the passerines – the group you may have heard referred to as either the songbirds or the perching birds.

Now, lots of birds that do not belong to this group perch, and a few could even be said to sing, so let’s just call them by their official name, the passerines. There’s a long story behind that name, but it’s not very interesting, unless you like house sparrows, so I’ll skip it.

In your field guide you’ll notice that the passerines are a large group, occupying roughly the last third of the book (37.5 percent in National Geographic, Fourth Edition and 40 percent in Sibley). The passerines, in the language of avian taxonomy, or bird categorizing, comprise an “order.”

The owls are an order, as are the swans, ducks, and geese; the loons; the woodpeckers; and other such groups. So you see that the passerines are a very large order of generally small birds. And, as I mentioned before, they sing and perch quite well.

Within the passerines you can immediately eliminate the northern shrike and the western meadowlark, because I don’t consider them small, either. The horned lark is sort of small, but most of the larks we see in Kootenai County have a yellow eyebrow – not all, however. Still, I disqualify the horned lark for lack of consistency.

Of the truly small and consistent passerines, you should come up with three species right away, assuming you are going from front to back in the passerine section of your field guide. The first is the red-eyed vireo – but who ever gets to see one? Usually they are singing in the top of some very leafy tree.

Then, in quick succession, you’ll find the mountain chickadee and the red-breasted nuthatch. You’ll find these next assuming that you have a newer field guide. One of the rules of taxonomy is that the names of a few birds, and the sequence in which some appear in the field guides – their phylogenetic sequence, again in the language of taxonomy – must be changed every few years.

That’s not actually an official rule, but sometimes I suspect that it’s an unofficial requirement imposed by the field guide publishers. These changes invariably insure that I will have to buy new books at just about the time I’ve figured out the old ones.

Anyway, in older field guides the vireos come after the chickadees and the nuthatches. The actual reasons for these changes are also not very interesting to normal people. Taxonomists, however, find it a challenging game in their attempts at understanding evolution. I know, I was trained as a taxonomist many years – and lots of field guide editions – ago.

Back to our search. In the rear of your field guide, in the sparrow group, or sparrow “family” to taxonomists – all of the vireos, all of the chickadees, and all of the nuthatches are each in their own family as well – you should find another four species. That makes seven, right?

Actually, wrong. It was a trick question. Way back I was also trained as a professor, so not only do I enjoy taxonomy, but I love trick questions. The trick is that I specified “small, fluttery birds.”

If you were to take the name “sparrow” and trace it back to its roots, you’d follow variations back through the centuries in Old English, German, and even earlier language forms as a term meaning “small, fluttery birds.” Thus when I specified “small, fluttery birds … with white eyebrows and a black line through the eye,” I was actually asking only for “sparrows” with white eyebrows and a black line through the eye.

See how much fun names can be? What do you mean, no? Well, anyway, the vireo, chickadee, and nuthatch are each disqualified too. So what of our four sparrows?

The lark sparrow is not officially a Kootenai County bird, but is seen here on rare occasions. One was seen in the area this spring, I believe. Similarly with the white-throated sparrow, one is seen in Kootenai County once and awhile, but not usually every year, and never during nesting season.

The white-crowned sparrow is seen in Kootenai County in good numbers during migration, but probably doesn’t breed here. I can’t recall ever seeing one at this time of the summer. I think that they do breed in more northern North Idaho, however.

The chipping sparrow, our last contender, is both correctly marked and does most definitely nest in Kootenai County. It is the one bird out of the 285 or so species recorded in Kootenai County that fits our search. If you did spot another, ignore it – I’m trying to make a point here.

So, what was the point of our search? Bird identification can be such a fickle business. Take the sparrows as an example. So many birders simply give up upon hearing the name. For the most part, we think of sparrows as unimpressive little brown birds that, even with a good look, are unidentifiable.

But it’s not really so. Some sparrows are quite impressive, quite unsparrowlike. Towhees, juncos and buntings (some) are all sparrows. And many other sparrows require only a glance or only a note or two to be clearly identified.

The chipping sparrow is one of these refreshingly unique sparrows. With the top of its sparrow head solid chestnut, with its sparrow face divided by a black stripe complete from bill to ear, and with its sparrow eye framed in white, this sparrow is identifiable at a glance. It is even identifiable with just a peak.

That’s not often said about sparrows. But think about the process we used to come up with “chipping sparrow” in our little search. Through a process of attention to detail and careful searching, we found our bird. But mostly we found it through a process of elimination.

We eliminated birds too big. We eliminated birds not likely to be in the area. We eliminated birds not likely to be in the area at a particular time of year. That didn’t leave many options to which we could apply our details.

So then we used those details, the ones that stood out, even when we only had a glimpse of a part of the bird, to make our identification. With the chipping sparrow in its hidden nest, all we needed was the detail of the eye area. We didn’t even have to use its unique chestnut cap, but we could have if other parts of the face had been obscured.

See my point? But then maybe you’re not totally satisfied with your identification, and the bird disappeared before you could get a better look. How can you be certain that it wasn’t the vireo, the chickadee, or the nuthatch? Don’t despair or quit here. You can still confirm your identification, even without the bird.

In this case, you have a nest to check out. This nest is an open cup of grass and other fibers, with a finely woven interior of hairlike material. The red-eyed vireo’s nest is a cup, but of a different design and of different materials. The mountain chickadee and the red-breasted nuthatch are each cavity nesters.

In addition, this nest has eggs, beautiful, spotted, blue eggs. The other three species have white eggs, all variously marked, but nothing like the chipping sparrow’s eggs.

Or perhaps the bird flew to a perch, but it’s silhouetted against the sun. You can hardly make out its outline, let alone details. And then it begins to sing or call. The other three species have unique and easily identifiable songs and calls. This bird gives either a single “chip” call, or a song that is a trill of “chip” notes, without variation in pitch or speed.

The “chipping” sparrow has just given you its name. There is none other like it. The junco may sound similar at first, but soon the difference is obvious.

And the list goes on and on. The way it feeds – where it feeds, what it feeds on. The type of vegetation around – evergreen trees versus leafy trees, grasses versus shrubs. The other bird species it associates with, or doesn’t associate with – a loner or a flocker. Where it sings – in the air, on a perch, exposed, hidden.

So you see, identifying a sparrow isn’t so tough. The chipping sparrow, from now on, will just jump right out at you – in terms of identification, that is. And its identification will just jump right out at you as long as it is summer.

For alas, come fall, chipping sparrows lose their chestnut caps and their bright facial stripes. In the words of one reference I read, these distinctive markings are replaced by a “streaky dull brown head pattern that is similar to other winter sparrows.”

But all is not lost. Fortunately for us, the chipping sparrow is soon on its way to Mexico or Central America. Let the birders lucky enough to be spending their winters there figure them out. They are no longer our problem!