Want to identify a song sparrow? Listen to the music

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record | USA TODAY NETWORK - NEW JERSEY

    Of all the birds that frequent North Jersey’s backyards, the song sparrow is the one that i’ve taken for granted for far too long.

   This small songster is what many birders like to dismiss as an LBJ –  a “little brown job.”  To the casual observer, they all look the same. You see them at the bird feeder or under it, and then you don’t. 

   A quick way to tell  the song sparrow from house sparrows and other LBJs is to look
for a heavily streaked chest with a large dark-brown dot in the middle. But my favorite way to identify a song sparrow is to listen to its song.

  That’s absolutely the best thing about a song sparrow. (They don’t call it a song sparrow for nothing.) I once heard that merry melody described as joyful, and that’s as apt an adjective as any.

   But if you listen real closely, you’ll likely agree with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which describes the melody  as  “a loud, clanking song of two to six phrases that typically starts with abrupt, well-spaced notes and finishes with a buzz or trill.” It’s all in the ear of the beholder.

     On a recent visit to Cape May, I heard the distinctive call of a song sparrow from the front porch of my beachside bed and breakfast.  The bird perched atop a nearby shrub, belting out its tune again and again with the gusto of an opera singer, all in the hope of attracting a mate. 

   Sure enough, another soon popped up, and they disappeared into the undergrowth together, presumably to turn that sweet music into a duet.

  As for me, I just sat there on that seaside porch, sipping my morning coffee and listening to the sounds of the song sparrow. The singing, with the surf lapping the shore nearby to provide the perfect background music, was a wonderful way to chill.

   Two weeks later, I visited New England, and darned if I didn’t hear song sparrows everywhere I went – from Acadia National Park in Maine to Plum Island on the Massachusetts coast. 

   When I returned home, song sparrows were there to serenade me.

   The strange thing was, the song sparrows in each location seemed to sing slightly different tunes. Brett Ewald of the NJ Audubon’s Cape May Observatory explained why.

   “There are regional variations in song that are similar but separable,” he said. “I don’t know why, but possibly it’s like the different dialects of English in our country. While singing is going to be most active during the breeding season, I’ve heard them at various times of the year.”

   If you want to attract song sparrows to your yard, Ewald recommends a mix of seeds, with some in the feeder and some spread on the ground.

The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday. Jim’s latest book, "The Screech Owl Companion,"  was published by Timber Press. Email Jim at [email protected].